Chapter Thirteen
There’s a peculiar kind of optimism that only exists in medical waiting rooms, and it’s always sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with its twin: dread.
Dr. Connelly waves me into his office where he now sits shuffling his papers with the care of someone about to explain why your body has betrayed you in new and creative ways. I know this shuffle. I’ve memorized its rhythm over months of appointments.
“Well,” Dr. Connelly says, dragging the word out.
“I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this.
” His wire-rim glasses slide halfway down his nose before he nudges them back into place, and then he swivels the massive monitor toward me.
“This is your last MRI from eight weeks ago. And this,” he clicks to the next image, his voice doing something I’ve never heard it do before—ascending into actual wonder—“is the MRI I just took.”
He flips back and forth, from the old one to the new one.
The first image—my eight-weeks-ago hamstring—looks like someone asked a toddler to draw pain using only black crayons and rage.
The muscle fibers appear frayed, like a rope that’s been used for tug-of-war between optimism and decisively-winning reality.
There’s this ghostly white clouding throughout the tissue—inflammation having a house party it forgot to end three months ago.
The tear itself shows up as a dark, irregular gash, like someone took a bite out of my athletic future and didn’t even have the courtesy to chew properly.
Scar tissue sprawls across the image in chaotic patterns—the body’s equivalent of duct-taping a broken vase back together and hoping nobody notices.
The second image, from today, looks like my hamstring went to Switzerland for a spa retreat and came back speaking six languages and owning a massive cryptocurrency portfolio.
The muscle fibers run in perfect parallel lines.
Where there was once that angry storm cloud of inflammation, there’s now just muscle.
Dr. Connelly keeps toggling between the two images like he’s trying to catch them in a lie.
“Liam,” he says, emitting a short burst of laughter in disbelief. “Your hamstring, your corresponding ligaments, your tendons…they aren’t just healed. They’re stronger than they were before the injury.”
“Stronger?” I ask.
“Not only is the damage repaired, but your glute-hamstring complex is firing at a higher efficiency rate than pre-injury.” He stares at the screen. “This should have taken months longer. If ever.”
“So, you’re saying I’m good to go? I can get back on the ice?”
He gives me a look. “I’m saying you’re a medical anomaly. What in the blazes have you been doing?”
I shrug. “Just followed your guidance, doc. Alternative options.”
“Alternative options?” he repeats.
“No stem cells, no magic potions,” I add. “Just diligent alternative training like you suggested.”
“Based on these scans, I don’t see why you couldn’t be cleared soon—a matter of days, or even later today.”
As I stand to leave, the excitement overwhelms my facade of coolness. I head for the door and instinctively find myself twirling as I exit.
Behind me, I hear Dr. Connelly’s voice, bewildered. “Did he just pirouette out of here?”
Walking into the Sentinels’ locker room, a tape ball smacks me in the forehead courtesy of Dewey Carter. A small tape ball or a chunk of snow scraped off a skate blade and thrown at you by a teammate—this is hockey’s version of a hug.
“Nice of you to join us, LeClerc,” Dewey calls out, his grin suggesting he’s been stockpiling insults since I’ve been sidelined. “You sure you’re in the right place? Don’t recognize you with a smile plastered all over that ugly mug of yours.”
“Well,” I shoot back, the muscle memory for locker room banter awakening like a bear from hibernation, “figured I’d come see what you guys did for fun while I was gone. Turns out it’s just missing open nets and blaming the goalies for your personal failures.”
Dewey smirks. “Big words from a band-aid.”
I walk up to my locker, and there it is, hanging in my stall like evidence at a crime scene: the white jersey with the red cross. The scarlet letter of sports. It’s been my uniform for months—the athletic equivalent of a dunce cap, except more dignified.
I grab it with the decisive motion of someone ripping off a bandage or deleting their ex’s number and launch it into the hamper. Around me, stick taps echo through the room.
I walk over to the jersey rack and snatch my real jersey—blue, full-contact approved, no warnings required—and something in my chest unclenches.
“There he is!” Dewey exclaims. “Now that’s a sight for sore eyes.”
My shin pads slide on, and suddenly I’m not broken anymore. Just like that: Two pieces of molded plastic against my legs, and I exist again. My body remembers this. It remembers who it was before everything fell apart, before ballet became my reluctant salvation.
“First chance I get,” I inform Dewey while lacing up my skates, “I’m putting you through the boards.”
“Would love to see you try. Welcome it with open arms, Clerky,” he grins then tosses me a roll of white tape.
The coaches hover in the doorway. They’re not convinced yet. Fair. I wouldn’t be either if I’d watched someone limp around in a non-contact jersey for months suddenly claim miraculous recovery via unspecified “alternative therapies.”
On the ice, everything’s familiar but enhanced, like my muscles went to graduate school and graduated summa cum laude while I wasn’t paying attention. Warm-up laps are supposed to be gentle. Instead, I open up my stride. My edges cut deep into the freshly Zambonied ice.
I’m flying.
Battle drills start the practice—three-on-three, full contact.
The puck finds my stick after I fish it out from a scrum.
A defender charges at me, but I dodge him with a quick body fake and then in one motion, lean into my stick as I spot an opening over the goalie’s glove.
The puck zips off my blade. Top shelf, bar-down, the sound of the crossbar singing its one-note song of victory.
“Holy smokes,” someone says from the bench.
We run through more drills—transitions, breakouts, forechecking—except nothing feels basic anymore.
I’m reading ice like sheet music, seeing patterns like choreography.
A defenseman steps up to cut my angle, assuming I still move in straight lines like a reasonable player, like the player I used to be.
Instead, I pivot with what might be a ghost of a pirouette.
The lane opens like curtains at Lincoln Center, and suddenly I’m past him.
“LeClerc!” The assistant coach’s whistle cuts through my transcendent moment. “First power play unit!”
The power play unfolds like a five-man symphony where everyone knows his part.
Me included. Hell, I might as well be the conductor the way I’m orchestrating goal after goal.
After practice, as I bask in the incomparable high that follows my first real hockey session in months, Rocky bursts into the locker room, phone held high. “LeClerc, you seeing this?”
“Seeing what?” I ask, hanging up my skates.
“Social media is losing its mind.” He scrolls with frantic energy. “Reporters were capturing video clips from practice. Nobody knew who was dominating out there. Took them a few minutes to realize it was you.”
He scrolls through his social media feeds. One caption reads: “Is this the same Liam LeClerc from last season?” Another reads: “Looks like someone hit factory reset on his entire game.”
Rocky scrolls through increasingly dramatic hot takes. “Listen to this one: ‘Liam LeClerc looked like someone who forgot he was supposed to be washed up.’”
Rocky grins like he’s personally responsible for my renaissance, like he’s been secretly coordinating this whole thing.
But here’s the thing about renaissance stories: they require an actual performance, not just a really good rehearsal.
Practice is one thing. Practice is controlled variables and familiar faces where mistakes dissolve into tomorrow’s corrections, and nobody’s keeping official score. Saturday is something else entirely.
Saturday is my first real game in more than eight months.
Saturday’s game is televised on ESPN and on Hockey Night in Canada, which means color commentators throughout North America, on both sides of the border, dissecting every shift while my family watches from their living room, pretending they’re not nervous.
Saturday is twenty thousand fans in person, and hundreds of thousands more scattered through the world, who’ve forgotten I exist suddenly remembering my name.
Rocky’s still grinning at his phone, reading tweets like they’re prophecies already fulfilled.
The locker room is buzzing, and the boys are ready for me to rejoin the lineup.
I want to bottle this feeling, this moment before reality sharpens its teeth.
Before Saturday arrives with its cameras and expectations.
The comeback starts now. But the real story? That gets written on Saturday night, in high definition, with color commentary.