Page 50 of Home Ice

I’d been watching their center. Their D turned his hips and was gone from the middle before I hit the line, the door standing wide open behind him. I saw it half a beat late, and half a beat is everything. His stick got a piece of the puck as I tried to cut. It skittered off my blade into the corner, garbage, nobody’s.

“You saw it late,” Coach Markel said on the bench.

“Yeah.”

“You won’t twice.”

Third shift, their D jumped again.

This time I felt it before I saw it. His hips turned toward the bump lane, and the door swung open behind his shoulder. The bump to Heath was available. It was the play we’d run all month. Everyone in the building expected it.

No.

I kept the puck and cut inside through the space where the D used to be, and now their strong-side defenseman had a problem: choosing between me walking in with a shot or Varga driving the far post.

He chose Varga. I held the puck one beat past comfortable and shot.

It hit the far post and landed in the net.

Varga arrived at top speed and didn’t brake. We hit the glass together with him screaming something Hungarian into my visor. Heath joined us and clapped my helmet with his glove.

“Turned the scouting on its head,” Heath said, delighted.

I glanced up at section 114 on the way to the bench. Halfway up, Trier’s sister-in-law had both hands on top of her head, and the man beside her was laughing. Trier bumped my shin pads with his stick as I sat down and said nothing.

Midway through the second period, I had a two-on-one charge with Varga, and everyone in the rink knew I was passing. Varga was screaming for it. Their defenseman slid in early to take it away.

No.

I shot high glove, and it went in off the crossbar with a sound like a dropped pipe.

Two goals. “You were open,” Varga said beside me when we reached the bench, staring out at the ice. “I want you to know that I know you saw me. I have never in my life been more open.”

“Their guy was sliding in before I shot.”

He turned and looked at me for a long moment.

“He learns,” he said. “The child learns.”

Their coach burned his timeout with four minutes left in the second. Down the bench, Coach Markel studied his card. We went to the room before the third period up two, and other than one late read in the first, everything had gone right.

St. Louis remembered they were a top hockey team in the third.

They scored four minutes in on a screened point shot that nobody in our end saw, including Pratt, and then the game got tense. They hit everything that moved.

With six minutes left, Trier went to the penalty box for holding a man who was about to score. I went out to help kill it.

Forty seconds in, the puck came around the boards to me with two guys closing and our bench yelling, “Ice it.” Shorthanded, you’re allowed to fire it the length of the ice, no whistle, and nobody minds. The safe play.

Their point man was charging down to keep the puck in, and behind him was sixty feet of nothing.

No.

I slipped it past his feet, out of his reach, and now it was me and one exhausted defenseman.

The noise in the arena didn’t spike. It climbed, row by row, the lower bowl standing. The defenseman backed off. I walked in and shot. The goalie got a toe on it, and Heath put the rebound in off his shin.

I never heard the horn. I felt it, somewhere under the shaking building, with Heath yelling into my ear and his glove on my neck.