34. Dante
Dante
Warmups start under lights bright enough to hum against my visor.
TD Garden is full. Sixteen thousand seats packed tight with sound, heat, and a crowd that knows exactly what it came to watch.
National Championship.
I take my first lap, and the ice holds firm beneath me.
My blades bite clean. The cold comes up through my boots.
My legs still carry the semifinal, Gio’s goal, and the celebration that emptied whatever we had left, but the heaviness has teeth now.
Addison has spent four years teaching us to skate through the burn.
Cole slides into view on the second lap and matches my stride. His blades hit the ice in the same rhythm as mine. We have been skating together since we were sixteen, close enough for shoulder checks, shared ice, and six years of learning the exact space between his body and mine.
He bumps my shoulder, light.
I bump back.
We run the passing drill. The puck moves between our sticks, tape to tape, the sound sharp in the cold air.
He feeds me a backhand, and I catch it without looking because I know where his backhand goes.
I send it back through his skates, and he kicks it to his blade without breaking stride because he knows where my passes land.
The scouts on the press level are writing.
Clipboards and moving pens. Four NHL teams with personnel in the building, ready to turn the next sixty minutes into numbers, rankings, a name on a draft board. June sits one sheet of ice away.
My hand tightens around my stick before I make it stop.
Maya is up there too. Press section. Credential around her neck. Laptop open. I found her the moment I stepped onto the ice, the dark hair, the posture, the way she sits forward with her elbows on the counter and her eyes tracking warmups without blinking.
Tonight, she’s writing about us. The Dante Voss-Cole Maddox pairing. The feature she has been building all season. She’ll write what she sees from sixty feet above the ice. The passing lanes. The timing. The way we find each other in traffic.
She will put the game on the page. The lanes, the timing, the numbers.
Beneath the hockey, there are six years of closed doors. Cole’s mouth against mine in the dark. My fingers in her hair when the lights stay on and nobody in the room looks away.
Addison pulls us in at the bench.
“You’ve played your whole lives to get to this ice.” His voice cuts through the noise. “This is the ice. This is the game. Leave everything on it.”
Adrian’s stick hits the boards. The team breaks.
The puck drops.
First period is a war. Wisconsin comes out physical, their forecheck suffocating, two men deep on every puck, their defensemen pinching into the neutral zone. Across the lineup, they are bigger than us. Their center outweighs Adrian by twenty pounds.
Adrian lines up anyway.
He wins the first faceoff clean and sends it back to the point, and the possession is ours.
Cole and I run the cycle. The puck goes low behind the net. I carry it along the half-wall, and two bodies converge: their winger, their defenseman, the lane closing in front of me. I protect the puck with my body, shoulder into the boards, and I wait.
One second.
Two.
Cole cuts through the seam. The lane opens for a fraction of a beat, and that is enough because I know where he is. The pass leaves my stick before the lane fully opens. It arrives on his tape at the exact moment he arrives at the spot.
He fires. The shot is hard, low, aimed at the far post. The goalie kicks out his pad. The rebound pops loose. I am already there, because when Cole shoots low to the far post, the rebound comes back to the slot, and I have been picking up his rebounds since we were seventeen.
I bury it.
Top of the net.
The horn sounds, and the building shakes.
Cole’s glove hits my chest. His helmet knocks against mine. Through the cage, his eyes are bright, wild, his mouth moving, but I can’t hear what he says because sixteen thousand people are on their feet.
I grab the back of his helmet and pull him closer until our cages knock together.
“Hell of a read,” he shouts.
“Hell of a shot,” I shout back.
The team piles in. Gio’s arm locks across my shoulders. Adrian’s fist pounds my back.
I glance up.
Section 114.
Maya is on her feet with one hand pressed flat against the glass rail of the press section. Her eyes are on us. On the two of us. On Cole’s glove still planted in the center of my chest.
Her eyes stay on Cole’s glove for one beat too long.
The next shift grinds into the boards. Wisconsin ties it midway through the second, a power-play goal, a screened shot Declan never sees. The building goes quiet for three seconds and then gets louder, the crowd pushing back against the silence.
Third period. Tied. The ice is heavy now, forty minutes of hockey burning through my legs, my lungs working harder than they should. Every stride costs double. Every shift feels shorter.
Addison shortens the bench. The starters are playing the rest of this game.
Cole is on my left. Adrian at center. The three of us on the ice together for the final period of the final game of our college careers. The rink in Connecticut where Cole and I first skated together is three hundred miles south. The rink in Milan where Papà wanted me is four thousand miles east.
The puck drops, and my stick is already moving.
Wisconsin dumps it deep. Declan plays it behind the net.
I pick it up and start the breakout, up the wall, through the neutral zone, my legs driving even though they are begging me to stop.
Cole is ahead of me. Two strides. He crosses the blue line and drags the defender wide, opening the lane I need.
The pass goes tape to tape.
Cole walks in on the goalie. Dekes. The goalie bites. Cole slides it five-hole, and the puck is in the net, and the horn is sounding, and Cole’s arms are up, and I am skating toward him so fast the collision nearly takes us both off our feet.
His arms close around me. My face hits his neck. Sweat, cold, Cole underneath the gear. Sixteen thousand people are screaming, and his mouth is close to my ear through the gear.
“Last one,” he says. “Last one on this ice.”
My throat closes. My glove tightens on his jersey.
The team hits us from all sides. Bodies, sticks, the wild, beautiful collision of men who just took the lead in a championship game. Somewhere in the crush, I’m swallowed by jerseys and gloves. Cole’s hand is fisted in my jersey and he is holding on.
2–1. Twelve minutes left.
Wisconsin pushes. Hard. Their top line comes over the boards on every shift, throwing everything at Declan, shots coming from everywhere.
Declan is a wall. He makes three saves in thirty seconds that have no business staying out of the net.
His glove. His pad. His blocker. The building is on its feet.
I block a shot with my shin. The pain goes sharp and bright, and I keep skating because stopping is something I can do in June. Cole clears the puck. I pick it up. We cycle. The clock keeps draining.
Six minutes.
Five.
Four.
Addison calls a timeout. We huddle at the bench. Water bottles. Shoulders bent over sticks. Gloves tight around sticks. Breath tearing in and out of men who have already emptied the tank.
“Hold the line,” Addison says. “Three more minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
Three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds. Cole looks at me across the huddle. His face is red. His hair is plastered to his forehead. His eyes are clear.
I nod.
He nods.
We take the ice.
Wisconsin pulls their goalie with ninety seconds left. Six attackers. The puck cycles in our zone, boards, point, slot, boards. I block a passing lane with my stick. Cole ties up their center along the wall. Adrian wins a battle in the corner and chips it out.
The puck slides to center ice.
Empty net at the far end.
Cole picks it up. Open ice spreads ahead of him. The empty net waits two hundred feet away. He could shoot. One shot down the ice and into the open cage, and the game would be over, the championship his.
He holds the shot.
Waits.
I fill the lane beside him, stride for stride, the two of us crossing center ice the way we have crossed every surface for six years. Hallways. Walkways. Locker rooms. The twelve feet of hardwood between our bedroom doors.
Stride for stride.
Then Cole gives me the puck.
My blade is already there. The pass arrives on my tape the way his passes always arrive, exactly where I am, exactly when I need it.
I shoot.
The puck crosses the goal line and hits the back of the empty net, and the goal horn screams, and the building erupts.
3–1.
Cole reaches me before the team does. His arms lock around my neck. His forehead presses to mine. Through the cages, through the sweat, the noise, the sixteen thousand people, his eyes find mine and hold.
“Together,” he says.
“Together.”
The rest of the clock is a blur. Wisconsin pulls the goalie again. We hold. Seconds drain. The horn sounds, long and final, and every stick on our bench goes up.
National Champions.
The bench floods onto the ice. Sticks go up. Gloves fly. Adrian skates in circles with his arms spread. Gio lifts Declan out of the crease. The student section pounds against the glass, and the noise turns into pressure against my cage.
Near the boards, Gio finds Zoe. She is pressed against the glass in the front row, and he skates to her and puts his gloved hand flat against the plexiglass.
She puts her hand on the other side. The cameras catch it, the jumbotron shows it, and the crowd makes a sound that is half roar and half ache.
Zoe’s face through the glass is open, wet, and fixed on him.
Cole finds me in the chaos. His helmet is off. His hair is wrecked. Sweat. Tears. The grin. The full grin, sweat-bright and wrecked.
“We did it,” he says. His voice breaks on it, the words cracking in his throat. “D. We did it.”