Page 50 of Five Hole

Then the weather comes inside.

I could not put a moment on it. There is never a moment. A horn goes over the far bench for a line change, for nothing, out of sequence, and my body answers it before my head can call it off. The drums under the visitors’ end start and do not stop. Eighteen hundred people get up on the seats behind the glass and the sound comes down onto the ice like water finding the low place. The building puts its hand on the back of my neck. And it does not take it off.

A point shot through traffic dies in my glove and it is not clean. Nobody in this barn can see that. The whistle goes, the boys change, the noise climbs. I am the only man alive who knows I was a half-beat late to it and got paid anyway. Then a wrister off the rush, and my glove goes out for an order that is not on the ice to hold. I am reaching for a label turned out. For a towel squared. For a shelf in a room three rinks from here.

So I go back to the top. Glove up. Blocker square. Run the sequence and let it close.

It does not close. I run it in my own paint with the barn coming down on me and it hangs open. The sentence with no last word in it. The floor-tips thing. I make the one move I have made my whole life to put the floor back under me, and the floor is not there.

The next shift shows me what that costs.

A shot from the wall with nothing on it, the kind I have eaten ten thousand times. My glove goes for it a half-beat behind where my glove lives and it catches the heel and drops. Then it is loose. Behind me. Spinning flat on its edge in my own blue with the whole open mouth of the net in front of it and my body turned the wrong way down the ice. I do not have it. I do not know where it is. I am down on the paint reaching backward with my glove open on nothing, and the barn pulls its breath in all at once, and I hear the breath and not the puck.

Wyeth Stack gets there. He comes off the far post with his stick flat to the ice and sweeps it off the line and up over the blue, no wasted motion in any of it, and then he skates away and does not look at me, because there is a code about that too.

The whistle goes somewhere up ice. The barn lets the breath out and turns it into a cheer. A building always turns a near thing into a cheer.

Rocco comes through my crease on his way to the change and does not slow down.

“Wrobel.”

“I know.”

“Freeze it next time.”

“I know.”

I stay down a moment longer than I need to.

That was a goal. On the board inside me where the score is actually kept, it is in. My glove was late and my body was turned and the wall came apart, once, in front of a full barn, and every soul in it saw a good play by a defenseman instead.

Nobody knows what that was. Not Marquette, who saw a scramble and a stick. Not Rocco, who thinks I lost a puck. Not the man with the notebook, who is watching a goalie who has not been beaten. The tape will not have it for another shift. Then it will have it, and it will have it as a soft one from the top of the circle with nothing on it, under a glove that was still listening for a horn. I have given that goal up before. I know its whole shape. I can see it sitting out there. Weather sitting on a ridge.

And then, late, I make the choice.

There is a stoppage. A puck frozen against the far boards. The barn gulping air for the last push. My leg is under me. This is not the leg and it is not fear. I want to be exact about that, in my own head, where no one can hear me.

The count in my hands does not lie. It never has. It is the one thing I own that no coach gave me and no notebook can grade. And it is telling me the thing I have spent four years in this building making certain I would never have to say to a living person.

I skate to the bench.

Nobody understands it. Marquette least of all. He comes down the boards with his face open for the first time all year. “Wrobel. What. Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Then get in your net.”

Here is where a man like me says nothing. Here is where a man like me goes back out and holds it alone and eats a soft one in the last minute of a final, and carries that into every room he stands in for the rest of his life. Because the other thing was a sentence he could not make his mouth do.

I make my mouth do it.

“I am gone,” I say. “The horn got in. It got in and it has not come out.”

“You haven’t been beaten all night.”

“I was late on the point shot and late on the wrister after it. Nobody saw it. I saw it. I will not get paid on the next one.”

“Everybody’s late. You play through it.” He is not open anymore. His face has gone back down flat and he is talking to me the way you talk to a goalie you intend to leave in. “It’s a final. It’s your final. You know who’s up there with a notebook.”