Page 238 of On His Team

She turns toward me. “What are you going to do if you win Saturday?”

“Celebrate.”

“Obviously.”

I smile.

Then she asks the question underneath the first one. “And if you lose?”

That changes the room a little. I look at the ceiling. “Wait until Sunday.”

“For selection.”

“Yeah.”

Gianna is quiet for a few seconds, then shifts closer and rests her head against my shoulder. “You’re probably getting in.”

“Probably.”

“I know you hate that word.”

“I do.”

Her fingers trace absently along my forearm.

I stare at the ceiling for another second before I say it. “I can handle losing.”

She lifts her head slightly.

“I mean it. If Michigan beats us Saturday because they’re better that night, I’ll hate it, but I can live with it.”

Gianna waits. That is one of the things she has gotten better at with me. She doesn’t fill every silence anymore.

“I just don’t want somebody else deciding when I’m done,” I say. “If Saturday is my last college game, I want it to be because we lost. Not because I spend Sunday sitting around waiting for somebody to decide whether our season counted enough.”

Her hand stops moving.

That’s the thing I’ve been avoiding saying because once it’s out loud, it sounds too close.

The end.

Gianna looks at me for a long moment, then leans down and kisses my shoulder. She doesn’t tell me we are definitely getting in. Doesn’t tell me not to think about it. She just stays there. She settles against me again, and for the first time that week, I stop thinking about Sunday.

Saturday comes anyway.

By the time we get to Detroit, Michigan has turned enough of the building maize that it feels less neutral than it is supposed to. Their crowd is louder during warmups, louder every time one of their guys touches the puck, louder when the scoreboard shows anything with their logo on it. It is not the whole arena. It is just enough to remind us whose state this is every few minutes.

Everybody in the room knows exactly what tonight is.

One game for the conference title.

One game for the automatic bid.

One game that lets us skip tomorrow’s waiting entirely.

Michigan scores first.

Stanley gets it back late in the period after a rebound sits loose in front long enough for three different sticks to miss it. He gets there fourth and finally buries it.