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We won it three to one.

The room was loud. I sat in my stall with my foot up on a roller and my jersey in my hands. It had about a pound of me in it, and the number on the front had dried stiff where the salt was.

The kid who ran our room put the bin down in front of me and waited on the jersey, same as after any game, and I said, “I’m keeping this one,” and he said, “Sure,” and went down the line.

I showered and put on the suit, rolled the jersey tight under my arm, sweat and all, and when I came out Cole fell in beside me.

“Say it,” I said.

“I have nothing to say.”

“Cole.”

“I would simply like the record to show that I’ve been extremely mature about this for six weeks.” He clapped me once on the shoulder and peeled off toward the family door. “Big finish. Very moving. I’m telling everyone.”

They were by the pillar where the families waited. Iris was asleep on Maren with Gerald’s tail wound around her fist. Maren looked at the roll of orange fabric under my arm and then at my face, and her eyebrows went up and stayed up, and she didn’t say one word.

Delaney had her coat back on. Her eyes were still red.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“That was the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

“It was a wrist shot from thirty feet.”

“I don’t care.”

I lifted Iris off Maren without waking her and got her onto my shoulder, and she grabbed a fistful of my collar in her sleep. Maren hugged Delaney goodbye with an extra beat in it.

Then it was the two of us and my sleeping daughter in a corridor that smelled of popcorn, and I held the jersey out. She looked at the jersey, not at me, with the number facing her, still damp.

“That’s yours,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Eli, that’s the one you⁠—”

“I know which one it is.” My daughter’s breath was warm and even against my neck. “Put it on.”

She took it off my arm with both hands. She didn’t put it on in the corridor, because the corridor had cameras and she was smarter than I was. She had it clamped against her until we were out in the players’ lot, and then she stopped at the passenger door and put it on standing there, over her sweater, arms up, with half the room walking past. I caught her doing it in the glass of the driver’s window and had to stop with my hand on a car-seat strap and take a second.

Then I got in and drove my family home.

Iris went down in her clothes, because nobody was waking her up to fight about pajamas. Delaney was in the doorway in my jersey over her sweater, the hall light behind her lighting the number on the front, and I reached past her and pulled the door to within two inches.

We didn’t talk on the way up the hall. She stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor and turned around.

“I want to say something before you say anything. I was going to be normal tonight. I had a plan.” Her hands were inside my sleeves to the knuckles. “Then you came out for warmups and looked up at me and I forgot the entire thing.”

“You raised two fingers at me.”

“I know what I did.”

“I stopped skating.”

“I know what you did,” she said. “Everyone in that section knew what you did. Maren had to look at her phone.”