Chapter 19 #3
We'd taken Game One clean, played smart, executed the systems Coach had drilled into us all season.
The series lead was ours to protect and build on, and I'd been in this position before — the team with the advantage, the one that needed to apply pressure and not let the other side breathe. I knew exactly how to be that captain.
Except I couldn't get Soren's face out of my head.
The Maples came out of the tunnel flying, reading the same script every team reads when they drop Game One at home — aggressive, physical, loud, trying to reset the series on their terms in the first five minutes.
Their captain won the opening draw and sent it back hard, and their wingers crashed the zone before we'd set up.
I was already a step slow tracking the play, my brain splitting its attention between the ice and a hotel room two miles away, and when the puck came off the boards I missed the read by half a second.
Their winger walked in clean on Saint. Saint made the save, barely, and I heard Dmitri swear in Russian from the blue line.
“Focus up, Cap!” he shouted, and there was no anger in it yet, just the tight edge of a man who needed his captain to show up.
I shook it off. Tried to.
The problem with guilt was that it didn't wait for a good time.
It didn't care about the playoffs or the series lead or the seventeen thousand people in this building expecting me to be the man on the captain's jersey.
It just sat there behind every thought, patient and immovable, and every time I got close to locking in it pulled me sideways again.
The Maples scored first midway through the opening period on a deflection off their winger's skate that I should have taken out of the play before it reached the slot.
I should have read the angle, positioned my body, made myself big and inconvenient the way I'd done a thousand times in a thousand games.
Instead I was a half-stride out of position and Saint had no chance at the redirect.
I skated back to the bench with my jaw clenched and the crowd noise feeling like pressure behind my eyes.
Coach pulled me aside at the next stoppage, and he didn't raise his voice. He never raised his voice — he didn't need to, which was always worse.
“Where are you right now?” he asked, quiet enough that only I could hear it.
“I'm here.”
“You're not.” He held my gaze. “Something's wrong. Tell me it's nothing and play through it, or tell me what it is and let's figure it out. But I need a decision in the next thirty seconds because your line is back out.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. Twelve years of hockey, six of them together, and he still read me like a depth chart.
“I'll play through it,” I said.
“Then play through it like a captain.” He put his hand on my shoulder briefly. “Somewhere in there is the man who dissected their penalty kill in the film room for two hours yesterday. Find him.”
He sent me back out and I skated to the face-off circle and stood there for a second before the puck dropped.
The Maples' center was a big kid, twenty-four or twenty-five, quick hands and a mouth that hadn't stopped running since warmups. He grinned at me across the dot. “Rough night, Kincaid? You look like shit.”
I looked at him across the dot and said nothing.
The second period was where it came apart completely.
I took a penalty for a hit that was a full second too late — a brain-dead mistake, the kind you made when your timing was off and your instincts overrode your judgment.
Two minutes in the box, watching from behind the glass while the Maples worked the power play with calm, deliberate efficiency.
They scored thirty seconds in, and when I stepped back onto the ice to serve out the rest I could feel the collective doubt settling over the bench like weather coming in.
Down two to nil. On the road. With their crowd going feral.
I sat on the bench between shifts and did something I almost never did in a game. I went still. Stopped trying to push through it. Let the noise wash over me and went quiet inside it, and in the quiet I found something I recognised.
Anger. Clean and specific and entirely usable.
It wasn't at Soren. It wasn't even really at myself. It was the hard, accumulated anger of a man who had been carrying thirteen years of loss and had finally found a place to set it down.
I took that anger and did something useful with it.
The shift I went out on four minutes into the second period was a different thing from anything I'd put together all night.
I won the draw and drove straight to the net without setting up, without reading the play — just going, body first, making myself the problem.
Their defenseman tried to take me out in front of the crease and I held position through the contact, stick on the ice, screening their goalie on the shot that came from the point.
It went wide, but I was already on the rebound, backhanding it into traffic, and the scramble in front produced a whistle.
“There he is,” Jace said as we cycled off, and I didn't answer because I was already watching the ice, tracking their deployment, reading the shift patterns they'd settled into now that they thought they had the game in hand.
Finn saved us, which I was going to give him grief about for the rest of his career and secretly be grateful for until the day I died.
He scored on a breakaway midway through the second — pure chaos hockey, a broken play that turned into a two-on-one that turned into Finn going one-on-one with their goalie and deking him into the ice.
The bench exploded. I was on my feet before I registered standing up, and the specific relief of it straightened my spine. One goal. Something to work with.
Then he did it again five minutes later, a shot from the point that found its way through a screen and caught their goalie moving the wrong direction, and suddenly we were level and the Maples' bench looked like they'd each been punched in the stomach.
“That's how we fucking do it!” Mason was bellowing, and the locker room energy coming through the boards had shifted into something I could use.
My third period was the game I should have played from the drop of the first puck.
I was physical in ways I hadn't been all season — taking bodies off the puck, finishing every check, making myself difficult and uncomfortable everywhere I went on the ice.
I won five of seven face-offs. I killed thirty seconds of a delayed penalty by being too much to deal with in the neutral zone, forcing a stoppage rather than giving them a clean entry.
When their captain tried to get in my head with a cheap shot behind the play, I turned around and looked at him with the specific expression that told experienced players they'd made a decision they were going to regret, and he took two strides backward before he caught himself.
The assist on Cole's goal came from a sequence I could have drawn up in the film room.
I forced a turnover in their zone by being relentless on the forecheck, won a puck battle behind the net that three weeks ago I'd have put at fifty-fifty, and found Cole cutting to the weak side with a pass he buried cleanly.
Three to two. Lead secured. Fourteen minutes to hold it.
The rest of the period was discipline hockey — protecting the lead, not giving them space to run, making every shift a defensive exercise that burned clock and forced turnovers and gave Saint clean looks at everything that came through.
I was where I was supposed to be for fourteen consecutive minutes, and when the final buzzer sounded I felt the full weight of the exhaustion land at once.
The team was celebrating around me and I stood in the middle of it with my hands on my knees and just breathed.
Coach found me in the tunnel afterward. He stood beside me for a moment without saying anything, watching the stream of people moving through the corridor.
“We won,” he said finally.
“Yeah.”
“First and second periods looked like you'd never seen a hockey stick before.”
“I know.”
“Third period looked like you.” He said it without inflection, which was as close as Coach got to a compliment in a corridor after a playoff game.
“Whatever you worked through between the second intermission and the third, figure out how to work through it before the next game instead of during it.”
“I will.”
“This about the guy?” He asked it quietly, and the question carried the specific weight of a man who had watched me lose my grip on everything and had a good idea why.
I didn't answer. My silence told him what he needed to know.
“Figure it out, Rook. I can't have my captain half-present for a round.” He paused. “But you came back tonight. Remember what that felt like.” He squeezed my shoulder once and walked away, leaving me standing in the tunnel with the noise of the arena fading behind me.
The locker room was loud with celebration, everyone riding the high of advancing, Finn getting roasted mercilessly for his sudden goal-scoring streak while looking absolutely delighted about it.
I stripped my gear off mechanically, answered the media questions on autopilot, showered without registering the water temperature.
By the time I made it back to my hotel room, the sun was gone and my phone had missed calls from Jace and a text from my dad that just said good third period, which from Martin Kincaid was practically a declaration of love.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall.
We'd won. I'd come back. Found something useful in the anger and used it instead of drowning in it, and the team had survived my worst two periods of the season and come out the other side with a two-nil series lead.
I picked up my phone and stared at his name for a long time, turning over what I'd say if I called, and finding nothing that was good enough yet.