Chapter 26 Nate - June 2023, Philadelphia
There was a specialty grocer a few blocks from my house that stayed open until midnight, and on a Tuesday night in June I was in it late with a basket.
Game Six was on in the store, on a small television bolted above the deli case with the sound off, and the two guys working were watching it.
I put in cream, then vanilla beans, which are sold in a glass tube for an amount of money that is difficult to defend, then eggs and a bag of the coarse sugar.
Then I stood in the aisle with the kitchen things for a while and bought six ramekins, and there was no reason on earth for a man who had never cooked to own six of anything.
I did not name it. I stood in a store with a basket and refused, at the level of language, inside my own head, to say what I was buying it for. I did not think a sentence. I put objects in a basket in an order and paid for them and carried them home in the heat with the bag against my chest.
I got in and put the bag on the counter and did not unpack it, and turned the television on.
Pittsburgh was up one with four minutes left, and then he took the puck off their number four in the corner and put it in the far side, and the man on the call said something about a mugging in broad daylight, and the horn went a few minutes later.
I watched the whole thing, them coming over the boards, the handshake line, a man I had not spoken to in three years taking a trophy from a Finnish defenseman and putting it over his head. And there is a beat in there where he turns and looks at the tunnel.
They hold the families at the tunnel. He looked at it for one beat with the whole thing over his head, and something went across his face, and then the grin came back on.
I stood in my living room and watched a man in Nevada be handed everything he had wanted since he was seven years old and look at a gap in the boards, and then I went into the kitchen.
The kitchen had a professional hood over the range rated for open flame work, because in April of 2020 a man in a garage in Minnesota went through a set of floor plans for a week like they were a video package and told me it was the only room in the building where somebody had thought about what could happen in it.
I'd owned that house for three years. I had never once turned anything in that room on.
I did it off my phone. Cream and vanilla in a pan. Yolks and sugar. Strain it, which I did badly. Ramekins in a roasting tray, water halfway up, oven at a temperature that a woman on the internet was extremely confident about.
It took an hour and I did not do one other thing in that time. I did not check my phone. I stood there and watched an oven.
Then I took them out, and put sugar over the top of one, and got the torch. The torch had come with the house, in a drawer, in a box, with the plastic still around the trigger.
There is a way to do it correctly. The flame keeps moving and it stays even and it leaves an amber sheet across the whole top with no dark on it anywhere.
I knew that, because I'd looked it up an hour earlier, and because my mother did it a hundred times in a kitchen in Camden with a torch borrowed off a man named Pryor.
I stood there at one in the morning with a lit blowtorch in my hand and went around the rim twice.
Then I turned the light off over the sink and I ate it standing up.
There is one other person on this earth who has ever eaten one like that, and the man it was for was somewhere over the Midwest with a trophy in a case in the hold and no way of ever finding out.
I washed the ramekin and put the other five in a cupboard and went to bed.
Eight months later they flew us to Toronto.
I packed on the Sunday, and my hands did it, the way they have made every real decision I've ever made.
Suits, shirts, the iron. Then I went into the second bedroom, which nobody had ever been in, and I opened the drawer in the desk.
A cocktail napkin from April of 2017 with a phone number on it in ink that had gone brown.
A European travel adapter with a wrap of duct tape around it that came out of a laundry cube in 2019 and never went back.
A folder with a letter in it, to a coordinating producer at a national network, dated in pen in the top right corner in July of 2018, arguing that describing Riley Kowalski as an effort player is not a compliment with a limitation attached but a factual error, with the entry numbers and two sequences with time stamps.
It had been read enough times that it had gone soft at the folds.
I put all three of them in the outside pocket of the gear bag, in the little bubble wrap pouch, next to a UMD keychain with the enamel worn off the face of the dog, and I zipped it.
I did not audit it. I've audited every room I've ever left since I was twenty-one. I've gone through hotel suites on my hands and knees looking for a receipt with a name on it.
I zipped a pouch with four objects in it and carried it through an airport and did not once ask myself what I thought I was going to do with a printed letter at an All-Star weekend.
They shot the retrospective on the Friday, in a ballroom on the fourth floor of the hotel with the windows blacked out, at nine in the morning.
Two chairs, angled in. A monitor on a stand turned so we could both see it. Six people on the crew and a segment producer named Dana with an earpiece, and a junior producer, maybe twenty-four, holding the question cards.
Riley came in just before nine in a gray suit with the jacket over his arm and said good morning to every single person in that room, including the second camera operator, by name, having asked her name at the door.
"Sinclair."
"Kowalski."
That was it. We sat down eighteen inches apart, which is what two chairs angled in for television come to, and they put lavs on both of us, and a woman came and did something to my collar, and then Dana said, "Okay, guys, we're going to roll the piece and get your reactions live.
Just watch it. Don't perform. Say whatever you say. "
They rolled it. It's four minutes long and it has music under it.
It opens on a handshake line in Chicago in April of 2017. Twenty-one years old, both of us, and he is soaked from a teammate's water bottle with a cut over his eyebrow open again, and he takes my hand and he does not let go, and the guy behind him has to stop.
They slowed that down. That is a thing an editor did, in a room, for pacing. A grip in a handshake line held half a second past the beat, slowed to a quarter speed with a piano under it.
Then a still photograph of a head table at the Hobey Baker banquet, shot from the floor by a wire photographer, in which a young man in a suit with sleeves an inch and a half too short has one hand on a ramekin and is sliding it across a tablecloth, and the man beside him in a navy tie is looking at him.
Then opening night 2017, and a rookie coming down the boards with both arms up celebrating a goal four feet from a bench he did not play for.
Then the mic'd feature from 2019. They used the faceoff, because it is funny and because nine million people have watched it, and it ran with the audio up, and there is a beat in it, one beat of absolutely nothing, from a man who had not lost a sentence on camera since he was sixteen.
Then balconies.
They used a few seconds of B-roll shot from a courtyard in this same city in August of 2020 by a kid with a camera who had nothing else to film, and it is two balconies, five floors apart, and there is a towel over each rail.
They put a graphic over it that said Sealed City, 2020.
I sat in a chair eighteen inches away from the only other human being alive who could read that frame, and I watched an editor in a room somewhere cut a private language into a montage for pacing, and I did the only thing I know how to do, which was to keep my face completely still while it happened.
That piece is four minutes long and there is not one frame in it that is about hockey.
They made our wedding video. They made it out of archive and they scored it and they put a network logo in the corner, and they screened it for the two of us, and everybody in that room was very pleased with it.
The lights came up.
"Great," said Dana. "Nate, you good? You want water?"
"I'm fine."
"Ten minutes and then we'll do the sit-down."
We had ten minutes.
There was a table at the back with an urn on it and a stack of cups, and he went and stood at it, and after a while I went and stood at it too, because there was nowhere else in that room to stand.
"What time do they want us back?"
"Two fifteen," I said. "They've got the skills thing at eleven and then a lunch."
"Right. The skills thing."
He picked up a cup and put it under the spout and filled it, and he did not put anything in it, and he handed it to me.
"This coffee's actually good," he said. "Nobody warned me about that."
"Thank you," I said.
That is the entire conversation. It is the first thing I said to Riley Kowalski in a room that was not a scrum since a raw bar in July of 2021, and it was about call times and coffee, and it was over in seconds.
I went back and looked at the wall for a bit.
The sit-down ran forty minutes and most of it was fine. Best moment of the rivalry. Hardest building to play in. Something about the 2020 series that I answered correctly.
Then the junior producer with the cards came in on the eyeline and asked the one the whole thing had been built for.
"So a lot of people have said the rivalry cooled off around 2020, 2021. The chirping stopped, the mic'd stuff stopped. Fans noticed. What happened there?"
Dana let it sit. She was right to.
And Riley Kowalski, who had never in his life taken more than a beat to answer any question from any human being, took several.
Then he said, "Yeah, I mean, look. You play a guy four times a year for seven years."