Mackie
it’s how dating me works
go be a hero baby
I love you
I stare at those three words for maybe thirty seconds. She said it like it was nothing—like it was obvious—and maybe that’s the point. Maybe for her it is.
Me
I love you too.
I put the phone away and spend the rest of the flight pretending to sleep while my brain does what it always does—runs the variables, calculates the exposure, measures the distance between where I am and where everything falls apart.
Barrett called me in two hours before the bus to the airport and I sat across his desk, waiting for him to tell me they were calling someone up from the AHL. Which is the right move andmakes complete sense when your backup goalie just went tits up in a playoff game.
Barrett leaned back and looked at me the way he looks at everyone—like the decision’s already made and the conversation is a courtesy.
“It’s your net now.”
I waited for the qualifier. The until or the unless or the for now. It didn’t come.
“Mine,” I said, because I needed to hear it back.
“Yours. Game 6, Game 7 if we need it. You’re my guy.” He picked up his coffee like we were talking about hotel assignments. “Get your head right. I need you sharp.”
I stood in the hallway outside his office for thirty seconds staring at the fire extinguisher on the wall because I didn’t know where else to look. My net. Not Luca’s net that I’m borrowing. Not the net that needs a real goalie they haven’t called up yet. Mine. And the thing about Barrett is he doesn’t say things to make you feel better. He says things because he’s already made the decision.
The game goeswrong from the start, and I can feel it in my body before I can name it—my edges are a fraction too slow on every push, my glove is arriving where the puck was instead of where it’s going, and there’s a lag between what my eyes are reading and what my muscles are doing that shouldn’t be there. Like the signal’s getting lost somewhere between my brain and my hands.
We go down 1-0 in the first that I see the whole way. That’s the part that’s hard to explain to people who don’t play goal—sometimes it’s not that you lose it, it’s that you see it perfectly and your body just doesn’t get there. My glove was late. Not by much. By the kind of much that still counts. The puck hit the back of thenet and I didn’t feel anything for a second, just this flat quiet, and then the crowd noise came back in and I skated back to my post and didn’t look at anyone. I’ve been waiting for the proof that I’m not good enough, and here it is, sitting in the back of my net for eighteen thousand people to see.
By the second period we’re tied and I start to think maybe I’m wrong, maybe I can do this. I make a few saves that actually feel right—the kind where your body moves before your brain catches up and the puck hits leather and stays out the way it’s supposed to. A cross-ice one-timer that I get a piece of with my blocker. A redirect from the slot that I swallow with my chest. For ten minutes I feel like a goalie again. The lag disappears, everything syncs up, and I think okay, okay, maybe.
Third period, still tied 2-2, and the crowd is deafening with the voices of eighteen thousand people wanting me to fail.
Four minutes left.
Their forward gets a breakaway and suddenly it’s me and him and seventy feet of ice, and my brain kicks into the read—his speed, the angle of his stick, the way his hips are squared. He’s going to deke. I know he’s going to deke because his hands are too quiet, he’s not loading up for a shot, and I need to stay patient, hold my position and let him make the first move and react instead of guess.
I guess.
He sells left, and I bite. I drop into the butterfly a half-second too early, committing to a read I wasn’t sure of. My body is ahead of my brain again, but this time in the wrong direction. He goes right. The puck slides past my pad—a clean finish into the open net. The arena explodes while I stay on my knees in the crease, glove pressed flat against the ice.
3-2.
I knew before he made his move. I knew I was going to guess wrong, and I did it anyway, because when you’re rattled you stoptrusting the process and start gambling, and gambling is how backup goalies become former goalies.
We don’t score again.
The final buzzer sounds and it’s over. The series is tied and we’re going back to Seattle for Game 7 and I am the reason.
I don’t rememberthe handshake line. I don’t remember the locker room. The next thing I know I’m on the plane in the dark with my headphones on, three hours of post-game autopsy running on a loop inside my skull. The half-second where I wasn’t good enough. Where I’ll never be good enough.
Jack’s a few rows up, asleep against the window, and I keep catching myself looking at the back of his head and cataloging every kind thing he’s ever said to me and stacking it against what I’ve been doing with his daughter. Rodriguez drops into the seat across the aisle about an hour in.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says.
