Chapter three
Trap Game - A game that appears easy but proves unexpectedly difficult.
Dante
The PA system crackled to life overhead, and the warm-up music faded down just enough that the broadcast feed piped into the arena filled the space where the bass had been.
“—and welcome back to playoff hockey, folks. I’m Dave Cartwright, alongside former Grizzlies defenseman Pete Kokrah, and Pete, what a story we’ve got developing here tonight before the puck has even dropped.”
I recognized Cartwright’s voice without needing to see a screen.
He’d called two of our road games during the regular season, and he had that broadcaster’s way of making everything sound like the most significant thing that had ever happened in the history of organized sport.
I tried to tune it out. I was stretching along the boards, going through my hip-flexor routine, keeping my head in my own preparation.
It didn’t work.
“That’s right, Dave, and I think the elephant in the room—or I suppose the elephant on the ice—has to be number forty-one for Colorado, Dante Russo, who is in the lineup tonight for the first time since being acquired at the deadline.
Two full months, Pete. Sixty-plus days of sitting in the press box in a suit. ”
“Sixty-three, to be exact. And I’ll tell you, Dave, I’ve been in this league long enough to know that when a team picks up a player at the deadline and then immediately sits him, there are really only two explanations.
Either the player arrived injured—and Colorado’s medical staff has confirmed that is not the case here—or there is something else going on that the organization has chosen not to disclose. ”
“And the rumors have been circulating since day one.”
“They have. Now, I want to be careful here, because we are talking about a twenty-three-year-old kid and his career, and I think the responsible thing is to acknowledge that we don’t know.
What we do know is that Russo came over from Chicago under circumstances that were—let’s say unusual.
A same-day trade, deadline day, a player who by every measurable metric was having an excellent season.
Forty-two points in fifty-eight games. That’s not a player you move because of performance. ”
I stopped pretending I wasn’t listening and let the words wash over me while I kept my face aimed at the boards.
“So what are you hearing?” Cartwright asked.
“I’m hearing a lot of things, Dave, and none of them are confirmed, and I’m not going to repeat unconfirmed information about a young man on a playoff stage.
What I will say is that the hockey world is small, and when a player of Russo’s caliber gets moved at the last possible moment and then benched by his new team for the entire remainder of the regular season, people talk.
The question isn’t whether there’s a story.
The question is whether the story is accurate, and whether it’s actually relevant to what we’re about to watch on this ice. ”
“And what do you think we’re about to watch?”
Another pause. Shorter this time.
“I think we’re about to watch a kid who’s been sitting on his hands for two months and who has something to prove, playing against the team that gave him away, in a building where he spent two years learning the game.
And my experience tells me that combination of circumstances tends to produce either the best or the worst hockey a player has ever played. Very rarely anything in between.”
“High stakes for Russo tonight.”
“High stakes for everyone tonight. But yes. Particularly for him.”
The warm-up music swelled back up, swallowing the broadcast feed, and I straightened and rolled my neck and stared at the far end of the ice where the Chicago net sat empty and waiting, the red pipes clean and indifferent under the arena lights.
Kokrah wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t wrong about any of it, which was the part that sat in my chest like a stone—the way accurate things could be the most damaging ones, the way a story didn’t have to be a lie to hollow you out.
I pushed off the boards and rejoined the drill rotation.
Best or worst hockey I’d ever played. No middle ground.
The puck dropped and the noise that went up from the building hit me like a physical thing—twenty thousand people who’d been waiting for this, who’d circled this date on their calendars and lined up outside and paid whatever the secondary market was asking because this was the playoffs and this was their team and nothing else existed in the world right now except the sixty feet of ice between the red lines.
I was on the fourth line. I wouldn’t see my first shift for four or five minutes at least, and I stood at the bench boards and watched and told myself I was ready.
I wasn’t sure I was ready.
The first shift was Renaud’s line, and they were good—controlled, disciplined, exactly the way Kincaid had drawn it up.
Chicago came out aggressive the way they always did, forechecking hard and early, trying to set the physical tone before the game had a shape.
Briggs laid a hit on Morozov in the corner that was a half-second late, and the crowd loved it and the ref let it go, which told me everything I needed to know about how the officiating was going to feel tonight.
Then Kincaid tapped my shoulder and I went over the boards.
The crowd booed. I’d kind of been expecting it, but it didn’t make it any better.
The ice under my blades was the same ice I’d known for two years.
That was the thing I hadn’t fully prepared for—not the crowd or the noise or even the sight of the Chicago jerseys, but the specific, intimate familiarity of this surface.
My edges found their angles before I told them to.
My body remembered where the soft spots were, remembered the echo of this arena off the high glass, and the muscle memory of it was so strong and so immediate that for one disorienting second, I was twenty-two years old again and this was home.
It wasn’t home. I made myself feel the dragon crest on my chest and remember that.
The puck came to me off a turnover at the blue line—a gift, a clean exchange, exactly the kind of opportunity I’d been visualizing for two months—and I had a lane.
It was there. Right side, Martinez caught flat-footed two steps out of position, the goalie just shifting his weight to follow the play, a window that was going to close in approximately one second.
I passed it.
I didn’t know why. Or I did know why, and that was worse.
My hands made the decision before my brain could override it—a flat, safe pass to Reyes on the far wing that killed the opportunity completely, and Reyes had nowhere to go with it and ate a hit, and we changed, and I came back to the bench and stared at the boards and didn’t look at anyone.
I’d been open. I’d had the shot. And somewhere between my brain and my hands, the calculation had gone wrong, contaminated by something I couldn’t name yet—a hesitation, a flinching back from the moment, like I was waiting for permission that wasn’t coming.
Kincaid said nothing. He didn’t look at me.
The second shift was worse.
Chicago had figured out, in the way that good teams figured things out in the first period, that the fourth line was where the pressure points were.
They started running at us—not dirty, not yet, just physical in that deliberate, grinding way that was designed to send a message about what the next six games were going to feel like.
A forward I didn’t know shoulder-checked me on a puck battle along the boards that was technically legal and felt like being introduced to a wall.
Another one tied up my stick on a face-off, and the ref didn’t call it.
And then Devereaux was on the ice.
He wasn’t on my line matchup. He was out there because Kincaid had changed his lines, or Chicago had, or the hockey gods had decided that two months of distance wasn’t sufficient penance and I needed this lesson delivered in person.
He came off the bench and found the puck with that unhurried, inevitable way he’d always had, like the game arranged itself around him rather than the other way around.
He didn’t look at me. That was the thing.
He didn’t need to look at me. He just played, clean and controlled and completely indifferent to my presence, and the indifference was worse than anything else he could have done because it confirmed what I already knew: I was not a factor.
I was not something he was managing or worried about or even aware of. I was simply not relevant.
I got the puck again with four minutes left in the period. Better position this time—top of the left circle, defenseman committed to Reyes, a fraction of space that was enough if I moved on it.
I looked for the pass.
There wasn’t one. Reyes was covered. I knew that. I’d processed it in the same half-second that I’d processed the open shot in front of me, the same window, the same geometry. I knew what to do.
I passed it anyway—a desperate, sideways dish to nobody in particular that a Chicago defender picked off cleanly and turned into a two-on-one the other way that Taz had to stand on his head to stop.
When I came back to the bench, Kincaid didn’t say a word, but I felt his eyes on the side of my face, and I stared at the ice through the boards and thought: you are doing exactly what they wanted. You are exactly the problem they told everyone you were.
The period ended 0-0. I walked to the locker room with the hollow feeling of someone who had been handed something they’d wanted for two months and hadn’t just dropped it but thrown it away.
The room was controlled, focused—Kincaid’s voice in the corner going through adjustments, Renaud nodding, the assistants moving with clipboards. I sat in my stall and unlaced my right skate and laced it again because I needed something to do with my hands.
“Russo.”
Not loud. But the way he said it—the flat, carrying quality of a voice that didn‘t need volume to land.
I looked up.