Page 147 of Full Contact

On the bench, Rook leaned toward me. “Their weak-side guy is cheating up. If I hold the middle, you can go hard at the carrier.”

“And if he doesn’t cheat?”

“Then I’m in the middle for no reason, and you’re on your own.”

We tried it on the next shift. It worked once. I went hard at their carrier, Rook held the middle, and the pass landed on his stick. On the shift after that, their weak-side guy stayed home, and Rook was in the middle with nothing to do.

That morning, the team account had posted a twenty-second clip from the latest Peaches episode. She was on the coffee table, examining a navy blue pen cap Ben had left there. She pushed it off the edge with one paw and watched it roll under the couch. Navy, the comments said. Steamers navy. By lunch there was a slowed-down version in the comments with a drumroll.

Near our tunnel, a row of fans had brought PEACHES KNOWS signs. In the first period, they held them up every time the puck came our way. Midway through the third, they were gone.

After the game, a reporter caught me in the hallway before I reached my stall.

“Has Peaches lost her touch?”

“St. Louis played well,” I said. “We didn’t.”

“Has she made a prediction for Saturday?”

“I haven’t asked her. She’s home sleeping.”

In the locker room, nobody was in the mood to be entertaining. Varga sat with a towel over his head. Callahan untaped his stick slowly. Heath had a bag of ice on his shoulder and a set jaw.

Rook sat down beside me with his skates still on.

“The third goal,” he said.

“I know.”

“Their center went low. You stepped up to him. I’d already rotated to the post, so their defenseman had the whole slot.”

“I thought you were staying high.”

“I should have been. I saw you start toward him, so I rotated.” He thought about it. “Next time, call it.”

My phone buzzed on the shelf while I was dressing. It was the Peaches thread.

Kelsey: Postgame note on the Peaches model. Fans remember the hits and forget the misses. Classic selection bias. I’d also question the methodology of consulting a forecaster who has no access to line combinations and sleeps nineteen hours a day.

Mark: This is the most rigorous thing anyone has written about the cat. I’d like to forward it to our analytics department.

Kelsey: They can have it for free. This time.

Russ: This is Josh. Peaches never said we would win. She just knocked off a pen cap.

On another night, I’d have stood and read the whole thing to the room in my announcer voice. Instead, I put the phone in my bag.

Varga lifted one corner of his towel. “Is that the sister-in-law?”

“Yes.”

“Does she have notes?”

“Nothing worth reading.”

On the drive home, I wanted Mark.

I didn’t want to talk about the game. I wanted to sit beside him, say three or four bad things about St. Louis, and have him say one dry and funny thing back. I didn’t want to be the defenseman who’d stepped up at the wrong time.