25. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE #2
Percy smacks his stick once against the post, more irritated than anything, while Michigan celebrates along the opposite wall.
There isn’t much to fix. Nobody blew a coverage. Nobody left a man alone. A puck came through four people and found the net.
By the time we get back to center, the scoreboard says 1–1.
That’s where it stays through the horn.
The room at intermission doesn’t sound the way I thought a locker room would sound twenty minutes into a national championship. Nobody is giving a speech. Nobody is screaming. Guys are pulling gloves off, reaching for bottles, wiping sweat out of their eyes while trainers move between stalls.
Percy takes his helmet off and sits with his forearms on his knees. Mackey is beside me adjusting something on his skate. Blue hasn’t said a word since we came off the ice.
“Just so everybody knows, if we lose, I’m transferring.”
Benson looks over from the stall beside him. “You graduate next month.”
“Then we have very little time,” Stanley grins.
Somebody laughs. Then somebody else does, and the room loosens by about half an inch.
“Oh, God, Stan.”
“Captain's last words to me. Beautiful.”
Fuller walks in and waits until most of us are looking at him before he starts.
“They’re entering with speed because we’re giving them too much room through the middle. Tighten it up before the line. If they chip it, turn and get it. Don’t back all the way to the fucking circles and hand them the zone.”
He points once at the board, changes where he wants the weak-side winger, then steps back.
“That’s it.”
Stanley is sitting across from me with his helmet off, hair soaked through, still breathing hard from the end of the period.
“One more,” he says.
Benson looks over. “Don’t start counting.”
“I’m counting goals.”
“Don’t do that either.”
Stanley thinks about it while he takes a drink. “That’s very restrictive, Reeve.”
A couple guys laugh.
Benson shakes his head and looks away.
Stanley points the bottle at him. “I’m a legend, remember?”
I laugh into my water while Benson tells him to shut the fuck up, and for about ten seconds it doesn’t feel like we’re twenty minutes into the biggest game any of us have ever played.
Then the warning horn sounds outside the room.
Stanley puts his helmet back on.
Nobody has to tell us to get up. We go.
Michigan gets the lead early in the second.
They come through neutral ice with speed, and for once our gap isn’t good enough.
Their winger gets outside, takes the puck wide, and turns the corner before we can close him.
Percy pushes across with the play, but the pass comes through first, and the shot is already off the stick by the time he gets there.
It hits the far side of the net.
The Michigan bench is on its feet before their guy reaches the corner.
I turn toward center while Percy takes a second inside the crease, then pushes himself upright and gets his mask settled again.
The scoreboard changes above us.
2–1.
For the first time tonight, we’re chasing.
The next few minutes get rougher around the whistles. Michigan has been trying Blue all night, little shoves after Percy covers the puck, sticks hanging around longer than they need to, somebody always finding him when everyone should already be skating away.
At 9:14, Percy freezes one through traffic and the whistle goes.
I’m turning toward the circle when I see a Michigan player grab the front of Blue’s jersey. He pulls him close enough that their helmets almost touch and starts talking directly into the side of Blue’s cage.
I don’t hear what he says. Blue turns his head slowly toward him, and I get ready. The guy still has his jersey. Blue steps toward him.
I’m moving before I think about it. Mackey is coming from the other side, and the linesman is already trying to wedge himself between them.
Blue gets close enough that I’m waiting for the gloves to come off. They don’t. His hands stay down. For a second, he just stares at the guy. Then he pulls his jersey free, turns and skates away.
The Michigan player calls something after him. Blue doesn’t even look back.
I slow down. So does Mackey.
Across the ice, Benson is standing at the boards watching him go. When Blue reaches the bench, Benson taps the top of the boards once with his stick.
Nothing else.
The faceoff comes back into our end, and we play.
With a little over six minutes left in the period, Stanley gets the puck along the wall and carries it high enough to pull Michigan’s defenseman with him. Benson is underneath, coming across the top of the circle.
Stanley gives it to him.
Benson takes the pass on his forehand and keeps moving instead of settling it. One Michigan stick reaches for him. He pulls the puck inside, gets around it and suddenly has half a lane toward the middle.
The goalie drops.
Benson shoots across him.
Far side.
Over the glove.
The puck catches the inside of the net and kicks back out.
Benson knows before the red light comes on.
He throws one fist up and turns toward the wall just as Stanley gets to him.
Our bench explodes. Theo reaches them next and drives both of them into the glass. Blue comes over the boards behind him, then Owens, and suddenly Benson disappears in the middle of it.
I’m still at the far blue line with both hands in the air.
2–2.
Benson finally comes out of the pile with Stanley hanging off one shoulder, and for the first time since Michigan went ahead, the building sounds like ours again.
At second intermission, I sit with a towel around my neck and my elbows on my knees while the room moves around me.
Somebody is getting a skate looked at near the door.
Percy is standing at his stall drinking with his mask pushed onto the top of his head.
Stanley and Benson are talking quietly across from each other, both of them still breathing harder than they should be after the horn.
Twenty minutes.
That’s what’s left.
For the first time all night, my mind goes somewhere other than Michigan.
I think about the whiteboard in Hawthorne.
We wrote win the fucking thing across it in January when we were 12–7 and Aspen had just spent an entire night telling us how easy we were becoming to read.
We wrote it before we were close enough to this game for any of us to know what getting here would actually require.
Sitting here now, that part almost makes me laugh. The words were easy. Everybody wants to win a national championship. Every guy in this room wanted it before the season started, before the whiteboard, before any of us knew what kind of team we were going to be.
Wanting it never changed anything.
The months after did.
Mackey made me look twice until I stopped getting burned when I didn’t.
Percy went from barely saying a word behind us to directing half the ice every time the puck came into our end.
Stanley got dragged into the middle so many times he finally started going there before anybody had to yell at him.
Blue spent February learning that walking away could matter more than winning whatever happened after the whistle, and forty minutes into the biggest game of our lives, he proved he knew the difference.
None of that happened because we wrote five things on a board.
We just kept doing them. I look around the room.
Nobody seems afraid of the next twenty minutes.
Tired, yeah. Stanley has a red mark across one cheek from somebody’s glove.
Benson is bent forward retaping the knob of a stick that doesn’t need it.
Mackey has his eyes closed beside me. Percy finally sits down.
But nobody looks like they’re waiting for something to save us.
Coach comes in and lets the room settle before he speaks. “It’s twenty minutes.”
Heads come up.
“You know what’s sitting on the other side of it.”
He looks around once. “Go take it.”
That’s all.
I pull the towel from around my neck and reach for my helmet.
Around me, everybody else gets up too.
The third settles into the kind of hockey where every mistake seems louder than it should. Nobody gets much room through the middle, and every puck that reaches a goalie comes with three people arriving behind it.
A little over seven minutes in, Michigan loses control behind its own net.
Stanley is the first one there, but the puck gets knocked away from him in the battle and rolls out toward the left circle. For a second, it’s sitting in open ice with nobody on it.
Then Blue comes through. He doesn’t settle the puck. He doesn’t pull it back or look for another option. His stick meets it in stride, and the shot is gone before Michigan’s goalie finishes pushing across.
It beats him over the blocker.
The red light comes on.
For half a second, Blue just stares at the net.
Then our bench loses its fucking mind.
He turns for the corner with one glove in the air, and Stanley gets to him first. Theo hits them from behind, Owens piles into the side, and by the time I get there, Blue has disappeared against the glass under half the team.
Somewhere beneath all of us, he’s yelling.
I can’t hear a word.
When the officials finally break us apart, we skate back toward center. Blue passes our bench on the way and Stanley reaches over the boards to smack the top of his helmet again.
Blue shoves his glove away.
Stanley does it again.
“Fuck off.”
Stanley is grinning. “National championship goal, baby.”
The scoreboard above center ice changes while Michigan lines up for the faceoff.
3–2.
There are twelve minutes and nineteen seconds left.
Benson bends over the dot.
The puck drops, and Michigan comes right back at us. They push. We get it out. They come back. Coach starts shortening the bench with around nine minutes left, and Mackey and I barely get our breathing under control before we’re standing again.
Percy makes one save off a rebound that has our entire bench yelling before I even understand how the puck stayed out.