Chapter Fifteen
But hey, they haven’t forgotten me.
Then I spot the scrolling text across the Madison Square Garden marquee in big neon letters: LIAM LECLERC RETURNS TO THE ICE TONIGHT.
The marquee’s message is certain; I’m anything but.
I stand there like a tourist in my own life, staring up at those LED letters.
Do I warrant the electricity I feel in the city tonight?
Do I even warrant the literal electricity lighting up the marquee?
Tonight represents everything I’ve been breaking myself apart and reassembling for. This is the test that matters.
The stick taps start before I’m even through the locker room entrance.
“Welcome back, Clerky!” Dewey shouts as he works on the meticulous preparation of his sticks.
I beeline it for my stall to retrieve my skates to make sure they’re sharpened just how I like them, and as I reach inside each boot to grab them—
Squish.
My fingers sink into something. Cold. Viscous. Not leather.
Four ketchup packets tumble out, and Dewey absolutely loses it.
“My god, Clerky. You walked right into that one.”
I hold up my defiled skate. “You know I like mustard better, Carts.”
“Hey,” he manages between gasps, “just making sure you’re really ready to get back in the trenches.”
I’m cleaning ketchup out of my skates, and I can’t stop smiling.
This is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Ketchup packets in the skate are akin to the Park Avenue doorman tipping his cap to the tenant who just arrived back from a long weekend in the Hamptons.
It’s expected and damn well appreciated.
Rocky appears, smiling widely as he approaches me. “Game’s completely sold out. And not just because it’s Toronto—your return is the story tonight.”
Sold out. People buying tickets to watch me either triumphantly return or spectacularly implode. But really, there’s only one person in the arena who matters tonight. She’s spending her last evening in New York watching me play, and that’s either poetry or tragedy, depending on how this goes.
The rest of the pre-game is a blur of getting geared up and focused. Before I know it, it’s game time.
The roar hits me the moment my skates touch ice. It’s that singular sound of twenty thousand people collectively deciding to care about what happens next. My heart responds by trying to escape through my chest and burst out from my jersey.
On my first shift, the puck finds me in the neutral zone, Dewey’s pass landing on my tape like a promise.
I push forward, legs firing with new strength, hands working the puck with muscle memory enhanced by months of diligent, painful practice.
The first defender steps up, angling for the hit.
I fake left, shift right, drag the puck outside his reach—smooth, instinctive, exactly like I’ve done a thousand times.
I’m flying. I’m back. I’m—
BOOM!
The word “blindsided” was invented for this moment. The Pioneers’ defenseman levels me. My head snaps back, and suddenly I’m studying the arena lights from a horizontal position.
The ice is cold. This is news to nobody, but lying on it while twenty thousand people gasp gives it a new quality. Let’s call it “humbling.”
So, this is game speed. This is what I forgot while I was doing grand battements.
The whistle blows as the puck deflects into the stands. It was a clean hit. I peel myself off the ice.
Next shift, I’m determined to make something happen, to prove that my marquee appearance isn’t false advertising. The puck bounces free in our defensive zone, and I pounce on it, ready to start the breakout that leads to the goal that validates everything.
Instead, two Pioneers forwards collapse on me. I try to spin out, to fight through, but I can’t.
Every play is just slightly off. Every pass arrives a half-second after I need it. Every stride puts me a fraction behind where the game is happening. My lungs are on fire, and my legs have decided they’re made of increasingly heavy concrete.
I skate back to the bench. The truth settles in with all the comfort of a freezing cold shower: I’m not bad. I’m keeping up, making plays, not embarrassing myself. But I’m not impacting anything. I’m a passenger in my own comeback story.
The game drags on, with little offense from either side. The crowd’s energy, once ravenous in the first period, subsides as the game lurches on. Without much to cheer for, the arena is relatively quiet as the final buzzer sounds on a 1–1 tie.
The marquee outside promised a return. What they got was a guy who used to be good trying to remember how to be good again.
The distance between those two things feels like the space between here and Saint Petersburg, where tomorrow Petra will be starting her new life while I’m here, still trying to reclaim my old one.
Game shape, it turns out, is like speaking a language.
You can study all the grammar, memorize the vocabulary, practice pronunciation until your tongue bleeds.
But until you’re dropped into a country where that’s all they speak, where the words come at you fast and colloquial and unforgiving, you’re just a tourist with a phrase book.
I need reps. Games. Time. All the things I don’t have enough of.
The locker room is quiet afterward, that specific post-tie silence that’s neither victory nor defeat, just a collective shrug.
Dewey pats me on my shoulder pad as he passes, and I know he wants to say something encouraging, but we don’t have a language for that.
We have chirps for success and silence for everything else.
As we get changed, Rocky walks over and shows me his phone—more tweets about my return, some positive, some asking if I’ve lost a step, some wondering if the injury changed me permanently. I don’t read them all. I already know what they say because I’m thinking the same things.
But here’s what they don’t know: returning isn’t a single moment. It’s not one game or one shift or one play. It’s showing up every day and doing the work even when the marquee lights are off, and nobody’s watching.
The bruises from tonight will be purple by morning.
They’ll map themselves across my ribs like watercolor clouds, tender reminders that I’m competing where I should be, on the ice with my boys.
There’s a peculiar satisfaction in pressing the bruises after they form—that sharp bloom of pain that says yes, you were there; you took the hit; you got back up.
It’s the body’s scoreboard. Each ache is proof of effort.
Tomorrow, when I catalog them in the mirror, they’ll hurt like hell and somehow feel so, so good.