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I coasted toward the bench with my jaw tight, resisting the urge to look at the scoreboard because 1-0 wasn’t a disaster. We had more than fifty minutes of hockey left, and one goal was nothing we hadn’t overcome a hundred times before, but Game Seven had a way of making every number on the board look carved in stone.

Max jumped over for the next shift and slapped the blade of his stick against mine as he passed. “Next one.”

I nodded. “Next one.”

It took us almost nine minutes to get it.

Cole won an offensive-zone draw and sent the puck back to Keegan at the point, who fired through enough traffic that the Vegas goalie had almost no chance of seeing what was coming. Max got his stick onto it at exactly the right moment, changing the angle just enough that the goalie reacted to a puck that was no longer going where he expected.

The horn sounded as it hit the net, and the building erupted.

“There it is!” Dave shouted.

“And listen to this place.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“What?”

“I SAID—”

“I know what you said.”

Max disappeared under several bodies while Cole hammered the top of his helmet, and Theron remained stubbornly unsmiling behind us because apparently his face would crack if he showed happiness before June. The hard nod he gave us was satisfaction enough.

“Again.”

We tried.

Vegas scored instead.

Their second came midway through the second period, when a shot from the blue line changed direction off somebody’s skate and went past Taz before he had any chance to adjust. He slammed his stick against the post once, furious with himself despite the fact that there wasn’t a goalie alive who could have anticipated the deflection.

“Nothing you could do,” I told him as I passed the crease.

“Score a fucking goal.”

“Bossy.”

“Ash.”

“I’m working on it.”

We worked on it for eleven miserable minutes in which I hit the post, Dante put one over the crossbar, and Max had a shot kicked away by the goalie’s left pad before Vegas managed to clear the rebound.

At the other end, Vegas nearly made it 3-1 when they caught us on another quick transition, and Taz somehow got across the crease in time to catch the puck with the very edge of his glove.

The entire bench stood.

“So that’s impossible,” Jack announced.

“I don’t think it is.”

“No, I’m reasonably certain human shoulders aren’t designed to bend that way.”

“Maybe don’t tell Rees.”

“I don’t tell Rees anything. He frightens me.”