Feel It To Win It
Bennett
It’s a funny thing, watching someone finally loosen their grip on everything they thought they had to carry alone.
The plays get cleaner. The timing gets sharper.
And suddenly, the thing they’ve been trying to force into place all season starts moving exactly the way it was meant to—because it was never supposed to belong to just one person in the first place.
Trust has a way of looking risky right up until the moment it works.
And once it does? Well. That’s when the real momentum starts.
Playlist: “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor
Emotion Night was Slammy’s idea.
Or rather, Emotion Night was whoever is inside Slammy’s idea, which is a distinction that matters philosophically but not practically, because the result is the same either way; our home arena has been decorated with oversized emoji faces, the scoreboard is running a feelings tutorial between warmups, and the promotional flyer that went out to season ticket holders this week reads, in large cheerful letters, COME FEEL YOUR FEELINGS WITH THE SORROWVILLE SLAMMERS.
Franklin looked at that flyer for a very long time when Pru put it on his desk. He did not say anything. He signed the approval form. He has not mentioned it since.
The building is packed. That’s the first thing I notice when we come out for warmups—a full house, which we haven’t had on a Tuesday in two months.
Apparently the people of Sorrowville will show up for feelings in a way they haven’t been showing up for hockey, which says something about this town that I’m choosing not to examine too closely right now.
I find her in the stands during warmups, which I always do, a habit I stopped pretending wasn’t a habit approximately six weeks ago.
Section 112, six rows up, wearing my jersey—not because I asked her to, she just started doing it somewhere around week three and I have never recovered—talking to Joely beside her with the animated ease of a woman who has been friends with this family for years.
She doesn’t see me looking. I look anyway.
“Cap.” Shep materializes at my elbow, skating in a loose circle around me like a very large, very enthusiastic satellite. “Are you ready for Emotion Night?”
“I’m ready for a hockey game.”
“Same thing tonight.” He grins. “Slammy’s got a whole bit planned for between periods. Crowd participation. Shout your feelings into the void, that kind of thing. Very cathartic.”
“Please skate away from me.”
“First period’s about to start. You should know that I intend to be emotionally expressive out here tonight, Cap. In honor of the journey.”
“Sawyer—”
“I’m talking about hockey emotions. Focused, professional, hockey emotions.” He skates backward away from me with the expression of a man who is absolutely not talking about hockey emotions. “Let’s go win this thing.”
The first period is a grind.
Their team is physical—bigger than us on the boards, aggressive on the forecheck—and we spend most of the twenty minutes playing defense and looking for openings that keep closing before we can get there.
We go into the first intermission tied at zero, which is better than it could be and worse than it should be.
In the locker room, I say the things I’m supposed to say. Adjustments. Positioning. The specific breakdown on their left defenseman who telegraphs his passes a half-second early. Standard stuff, the language of a game I’ve been playing since I was five years old.
What I don’t say—what I’m only starting to understand myself—is that we’re playing tight. Not because of talent. Not because of preparation. Because they can feel me on the bench, coiled and controlled, and it’s traveling through the lines.
I don’t know how to fix that in an intermission speech. So I say the tactical things and trust that the second period will shake something loose.
It doesn’t entirely. We score first—Holden, off a scramble in front of the net, ugly but it counts—and then give it back four minutes later on a defensive breakdown that I take apart in my head approximately six times on the bench before I make myself stop, because replaying mistakes while the game is still happening is the fastest way to create more of them.
Between the second and third periods, Slammy takes the ice.
I will say this: whatever is happening inside that costume tonight, it is committed.
Slammy skates to center ice with a wireless microphone—I didn’t know Slammy had a wireless microphone, I have questions about when this was acquired and approved—and begins leading the crowd through what can only be described as a feelings exercise for two thousand people.
“HAPPINESS,” Slammy announces, and the crowd cheers.
I don’t recognize the raspy voice.
“FRUSTRATION,” Slammy announces, and the crowd boos dramatically, which is accurate.
“DETERMINATION,” Slammy announces, and the crowd does something between a roar and a war cry that makes the building shake.
From the tunnel, the team watches this.
“Should we be taking notes?” Holden asks.
“I have notes,” Shep says. “I’ve had notes for weeks.”
“Sawyer,” I say, without heat.
“Right. Hockey.” He doesn’t stop grinning. “Hockey feelings only.”
Slammy finishes with one final instruction, involving the entire crowd standing up and exhaling at the same time, which is either a breathing exercise or a fire hazard depending on how you look at it. Then Slammy takes a bow, skates a small preparatory lap, and exits the ice to a standing ovation.
The third period starts.
It’s tied with four minutes left when Coach Duff calls timeout.
Not because anything has gone wrong, exactly.
We’ve been trading chances for fifteen minutes, both teams running on fumes and adrenaline and whatever the Sorrowville crowd has been feeding into the building since Slammy’s intermission performance.
The energy in the arena is different from anything I’ve felt this season—loud and invested and alive in a way that our home games stopped being sometime in October.
We cluster at the bench. Duff has his clipboard. His expression is the one he gets when he’s already made a decision and is checking his math one final time.
Then he looks at me.
Not at the clipboard. At me.
“Foster.” His voice is flat and even, the voice he uses when he wants to be heard without raising it. “What do you see.”
Not a question. A request.
I’ve been playing hockey my whole life and Coach Duff has never once asked me what I see in a timeout. He tells us what he sees. He draws on the board and points at things and we execute them. That’s the system. That’s how it works.
The guys are looking at me now. Sweaty, breathing hard, waiting.
I look at the ice. I’ve been looking at it for fifty-six minutes.
I know where their defense is leaning, I know which of their forwards is a step slow in the third because he always is, I know exactly which lane has been open all night and hasn’t been used yet because we keep running the same sets out of habit.
“Their right side,” I say. “Sixteen keeps cheating toward the middle when he’s tired. He’s been doing it since the second period and we haven’t gone at him yet.” I look at Shep. “If we move the puck fast up the left wall and you time the cut—”
“I cut to the back door,” Shep says, and his eyes are sharp in a way they get sometimes that reminds me he’s a better player than he lets on most of the time.
“You’ll have a step on him.” I look at Duff. “We need it to be fast. No hesitation.”
Duff looks at the clipboard. Looks at me. Looks at the ice.
“Do it,” he says.
Once the timeout ends. We take the faceoff.
I won’t pretend the next ninety seconds is clean or elegant or the kind of hockey you draw up on a whiteboard and execute perfectly.
It’s a puck battle behind the net and a blocked shot and a scramble in the neutral zone and Holden making a pass he probably shouldn’t have attempted that somehow works anyway.
But the puck moves up the left wall fast, the way I said, and their sixteen is a step slow cutting back, the way I said, and Shep reads it—times the cut exactly right, hits the back door at full speed—
The shot goes in.
The building detonates.
I feel it in my chest before I hear it—that specific concussive wave of two thousand people reacting at the same moment, the sound arriving half a second after the physical impact of it. The red light is on. The horn is going. The bench has cleared before I’ve fully processed what happened.
Shep is already doing the lap.
I don’t know where the road flares came from.
I genuinely do not know how he got road flares onto the ice or when he had time to acquire them or how any of this was approved by anyone in any position of authority, but there he is—Shep Sawyer, both arms extended, a flare burning red in each hand, skating the fastest, loudest, most committed victory lap I have ever witnessed in a professional hockey context.
“WOOOOOOO!”
It echoes off the rafters. It probably echoes off the marquee outside. It is the sound of a man who has been building toward this moment all season and is absolutely not going to let it pass without full documentation.
And pyrotechnics.
Slammy appears from the tunnel—I have no idea how Slammy got back into skates this fast—and joins the lap.
The crowd is on its feet. The scoreboard shows a bunch of emoji graphics that the AV team clearly prepared in advance, which means someone believed this was going to happen, which means something about this team that I’m only now starting to understand.
I stand at the edge of the celebration and let myself feel it.
Not manage it. Not catalog it for later processing.
Just feel it—the win, the play, the fact that Coach Duff asked me what I see and I told him and it worked.
The fact that it worked not because I controlled every variable but because I trusted Shep to time the cut and Holden to make the pass and the guys to execute a strategy I called with ninety seconds and no whiteboard.
Three months ago, I would have been drawing up that play myself and putting myself in Shep’s position because trusting someone else to execute meant giving up control.
Three months ago, I couldn’t name what I was feeling on a Post-it note.
I look up into section 112.
She’s on her feet. Both hands over her mouth.
Eyes bright in the arena light. She’s not looking at the lap or at Slammy or at the scoreboard.
She’s looking at me, at the spot where I’m standing just outside the celebration, and she sees the thing I’m feeling—I know she sees it because she’s always seen it, she’s been seeing it since before I could admit it was there.
I tap my chest once, quick, where nobody else would notice.
She drops one hand from her mouth and does the same thing back.
Then Shep completes his lap and crashes into me from behind with the full force of a man who has been waiting all season for something worth celebrating.
The team pile-on begins, and I go under in a tangle of jerseys and pads and Shep still somehow holding one of the road flares.
I am laughing—actually laughing, in the middle of it, with my team—for the first time in longer than I can remember.
First of eight.
Seven to go.