Page 108 of Breakaway
Chapter 37: Luca
April: Round 1 Wild Card Game
Period 3
The third period ice is not the first period ice. Forty minutes of playoff hockey have ground the surface into something heavier. The edges catch where they glided clean. The snow builds in the corners and along the boards where the Zamboni can't reach. The building has not sat down. I am not sure the building remembers how to sit down. Eighteen thousand people on their feet through a tied game in April, the noise a pressure I feel behind my eyes and in the bones of my face.
1-1.
The tying goal is now on the scoreboard. It’s number eleven, Mercer. A wrister, high glove side, on the power play. A clean goal. I saw it from the bench, saw the net bulge, and watched the away bench erupt. Nothing was wrong with any of it, except I know what it means for the man who scored it to still be playing hockey in April. He told me in a kitchen days ago that his playing days are almost over.
Nobody in this building knows that. The scoreboard knows his name and his number and the time of the goal. It does not know that a man just scored in what might be the last game of his life, and that the goal was beautiful, and that I am proud of him in a way I cannot say out loud in a room with eighteen thousand people in it. Not tonight, but soon.
I come over the boards. First shift of the period. My legs are good. The cold fills my lungs on the first stride and my edges bite and my stick is on the ice and the game is the game. The game does not care what I carry onto it. The game only asks what I do with my feet and my hands and the six inches of blade between me and the surface. I have always liked that about the game. It is the one place where the noise in my head is quieter than the noise in the building.
Their center drives wide. I close the lane, angle him toward the boards. The contact jolts through my shoulder and I hold my ground and the puck squirts free. Hájek picks it up along the wall. Cycles it back to the point. The possession continues and the clock continues and the third period of a tied playoff game is a specific kind of time where every second has a weight you can feel in your legs.
The bench. Water. My lungs pulling cold air through the bottle.
Down the bench, Soucy is in his pads with his mask pushed up on his forehead. His gloves are off. His hands are on his knees and I watch his fingers move. Right hand. Thumb to index finger, thumb to middle, thumb to ring, thumb to pinky. Back. Pinky, ring, middle, index. The sequence runs twice, three times, four. Steady. Rhythmic. His eyes are on the ice but his hands are somewhere else, running a pattern that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with something I don't have a name for. He catches me looking and his hands go still on his knee. I look away.
Marchetti drops beside me. His breath is short. His jaw is set.
"They're collapsing the neutral zone," he says. "The seam is gone."
"It'll open."
"When?"
"When they get tired of collapsing it. Nobody runs that structure for twenty minutes. Their legs won't let them."
He shakes his head. Not disagreeing. Processing. Marchetti processes out loud the way other people breathe. His mouth guard dangles from his cage and his eyes are already back on the ice, reading the play, reading the gaps.
I watch him take the ice. The stride that has not changed since the first day of camp. The legs, the hands, the focus underneath the noise. He is the best linemate I have ever had and he does not know half the reasons that sentence is true.
My shift. I take a pass from Jensen at the hash marks and carry it wide. Their defenseman reads it, steps up, takes the body. Clean hit, nothing dirty. I keep my feet. Cycle the puck back and the play develops and the building pushes the noise higher.
Eleven minutes. Lundy makes a save in the crease. Blocker side, hard. The puck bounces into the corner and the whistle comes and the building exhales. Down the bench, Soucy's body goes completely still. Not the stillness of a backup watching the game. A different stillness. His mask is up and his eyes are locked on the crease where Lundy is resetting, shaking out his glove, tapping his posts the way goalies tap their posts. Soucy's hands are flat on his pads. The finger pattern has stopped. His whole body is pointed at the crease like a compass needle that has found its north and cannot look anywhere else.
I have seen that look. I have worn that look. I know what it costs to sit still while someone you love does something dangerous and the only thing you are allowed to do is watch.
I look away from that, too.
Eight minutes. Six. The shifts get shorter. Thirty-five seconds, thirty. The clock compresses the game into something dense and airless and the building can feel it. Every whistle is louder. Every save is bigger.
Four minutes. The scoreboard reads 1-1 and the third period is running out and the season is running out and on the other bench is a man who is running out of time on the ice.
I do not think about that. I think about my edges and my stick and the next shift. The game asks me to be here and I am here. The rest of it will be true when the buzzer sounds. Right now the only thing that is true is the puck.
Two minutes. Coach sends me over the boards. Marchetti is on my left. Hájek on my right. The ice is heavy and slow under my blades and my legs are burning and the puck is in the corner on their side and Marchetti is going to get it because Marchetti always goes to get it.
He wins the board battle. His shoulder into their defenseman's chest, the puck jarring free along the wall. It comes to Hájek at the blue line. Hájek looks up. I am already moving.
The lane opens between their defense pair. I have been seeing lanes since I was nine years old on a rink in Zurich, and this one is there for a second, maybe less, and I am through it.
Hájek sends it. Flat and hard. Tape to tape. The pass arrives at exactly the speed my stick needs it to arrive.
1:34 on the clock.
