Page 280 of On His Team

I’m turning toward the circle when I see a Michigan player grab the front of Blue’s jersey. He pulls him close enough that their helmets almost touch and starts talking directly into the side of Blue’s cage.

I don’t hear what he says. Blue turns his head slowly toward him, and I get ready. The guy still has his jersey. Blue steps toward him.

I’m moving before I think about it. Mackey is coming from the other side, and the linesman is already trying to wedge himself between them.

Blue gets close enough that I’m waiting for the gloves to come off. They don’t. His hands stay down. For a second, he just stares at the guy. Then he pulls his jersey free, turns and skates away.

The Michigan player calls something after him. Blue doesn’t even look back.

I slow down. So does Mackey.

Across the ice, Benson is standing at the boards watching him go. When Blue reaches the bench, Benson taps the top of the boards once with his stick.

Nothing else.

The faceoff comes back into our end, and we play.

With a little over six minutes left in the period, Stanley gets the puck along the wall and carries it high enough to pull Michigan’s defenseman with him. Benson is underneath, coming across the top of the circle.

Stanley gives it to him.

Benson takes the pass on his forehand and keeps moving instead of settling it. One Michigan stick reaches for him. He pulls the puck inside, gets around it and suddenly has half a lane toward the middle.

The goalie drops.

Benson shoots across him.

Far side.

Over the glove.

The puck catches the inside of the net and kicks back out.

Benson knows before the red light comes on.

He throws one fist up and turns toward the wall just as Stanley gets to him.

Our bench explodes. Theo reaches them next and drives both of them into the glass. Blue comes over the boards behind him, then Owens, and suddenly Benson disappears in the middle of it.

I’m still at the far blue line with both hands in the air.

2–2.

Benson finally comes out of the pile with Stanley hanging off one shoulder, and for the first time since Michigan went ahead, the building sounds like ours again.

At second intermission, I sit with a towel around my neck and my elbows on my knees while the room moves around me. Somebody is getting a skate looked at near the door. Percy is standing at his stall drinking with his mask pushed onto the top of his head. Stanley and Benson are talking quietly across from each other, both of them still breathing harder than they should be after the horn.

Twenty minutes.

That’s what’s left.

For the first time all night, my mind goes somewhere other than Michigan. I think about the whiteboard in Hawthorne. We wrote win the fucking thing across it in January when we were 12–7 and Aspen had just spent an entire night telling us how easy we were becoming to read. We wrote it before we were close enough to this game for any of us to know what getting here would actually require.

Sitting here now, that part almost makes me laugh. The words were easy. Everybody wants to win a national championship. Every guy in this room wanted it before the season started, before the whiteboard, before any of us knew what kind of team we were going to be.

Wanting it never changed anything.

The months after did.