Page 145 of Puck You Both

They're not shooting to score right now, they're shooting to make me move, stacking work on my legs, and my legs answer every request with a debt against the next one. Post to post. Squeeze. Freeze it when the traffic gets stupid.

Whistle. Breathe.

Becker skates by my crease on the change and taps my pads twice with his stick. He doesn't say anything. Five minutes from the thing we've all wanted since forever and a day, and one of the mouthiest men I know has gone silent.

They come again. Kane swallows a slapshot with his ribs and doesn't even look down, just banks it off the glass and out, and the stands scream like it's a goal. Faceoff outside my zone. I use the ten seconds to drink and to look, once, up behind my net.

The box is too far to see faces, but I don't need faces. I know they’re all there.

Four minutes. The game bends toward my end. Right now, the biggest night of my life feels exactly like any other game night. There’s no special music in it, no story, just the next save arriving on schedule. Tip from the slot, pad. Rebound whacked at my hip, arm. A puck flying through four bodies that I track by faith and catch by conviction. The glass behind me shakes from fist bangs.

At 2:04 their coach burns his timeout, and at the bench my team leans on the boards and gulps air. Coach Martin talks systems I already know, so I stop listening and find Washington.

He's not listening either. He's looking down the ice at my net, at the zone where the rest of his career is going to happen, all two minutes of it, then at me, and eight months’ worth of a promise passes between us with no words in it.

I made it in his living room, with the entire team as a witness.

I’ll keep it. I swear, I’ll fucking keep it.

Their goalie leaves at 1:22 and my life becomes six attackers and a blur.

They're good. They move it faster than any team we've seen this spring, seams opening and closing like something breathing. I stop being a person in any useful sense. I'm a position. An answer to a question asked over and over. Shot, save, scramble, swallow it, live. The clock over their zone is a rumor I can't afford. Becker loses his stick and turtles forward with his body. Kane plays half a shift on one knee. My guys are dying in front of me by choice, and I mind the net behind them. Somewhere out there, the entire city is standing.

Forty seconds. I know that from the wave of sound that comes when the board flips, a roar with a countdown attached.

Then it happens, all at once, out of nothing. Point shot, tipped in the slot, direction gone. It hits something, a shin or a skate or a dream, and squirts to the back where their captain has been living all night, and there's a net's worth of open behind me and my body is already moving. No technique left. I dive, paddle flat, and the puck meets the shaft of my stick with a click I feel in my teeth. The rebound sits there, naked, in the blue paint, out of reach, the whole season lying on the ice between four sticks—

Becker gets there.

Becker, stickless, kneels on it.

The referees would have many opinions about a defenseman covering a puck in the crease. The horn beats them to it, half a second before Becker’s collapse.

The horn.

It goes off like the state is being launched. The ice fills before I'm off my knees, gloves and helmets raining, Kane hauling me up by the chest protector, Becker screaming into my mask from a distance of zero, tears already falling, and then, I'm at the bottom of a pile of every idiot I love in this uniform, crushed, boiling, the cheers pouring down on us in confetti and horn blast, and the only thought in my whole head, over and over, is that it's done, we did it, he gets to leave with it.

We won the Cup.

I find him in the chaos by instinct. Washington is at the blue line with his arms up and his face wide open, Leila already crying on the glass above him, and when the pile finally releases me I skate to him and he takes my head in both gloves, forehead to my mask.

"You said we'd win," he says.

"You told me to."

The next stretch happens in pieces. Handshakes with gutted men nursing a broken dream. A carpet appears at center ice. A man in a suit says words into a microphone and the building screams WASHINGTON over and over, and then the Cup comes out of its case into the lights and the noise finds a volume I didn't know a roof could hold.

Washington takes it calm, at his own pace, and lifts it. I've watched this ceremony on television my whole life. No camera has ever caught what it does to the ice under your feet, the shake of it, the whole floor jumping in time. He does his lap. He kisses his wife over the glass. He ages backward about twenty years.

Then he skates the Cup toward us, and the protocol matters, everyone knows the protocol, the captain chooses who's next. There's a whole roster of men who've bled longer than me, and Washington looks straight through all of them and stops in front of me, putting thirty-five pounds of everything into my hands.

"The A was practice," he says.

I’ve nothing left in me. Even my throat is gone. I hoist it, arms knowing what to do even when my mind is failing. The roar lands on us, physical, and I hold it up, and toward the man who just handed it to me.

I guess you can cry in front of thousands and keep your reputation, since everyone's doing it.

I pass it to Becker, who has waited his whole loud life for this. He goes so weak lifting it that Kane has to hold his elbow.