Forty-nine
Playlist: “All Fired Up” – Pat Benatar
The arena is loud before we even take the ice.
Not the polite, hopeful loud of a team whose fans have learned to manage expectations.
This is different. This is a packed house.
Four thousand people who have been waiting all season for permission to believe in something, and tonight they’ve decided they’re not waiting anymore.
The noise hits me in the tunnel like a physical thing—warm and enormous and completely indifferent to the fact that we still have to go out there and earn it.
One win. That’s all we need.
The Springfield Coyotes are good. They’ve been good all season, the kind of team that executes cleanly and makes very few mistakes and doesn’t care at all about the narrative weight of what this game means to a small Minnesota town that put a countdown board in a bar two weeks ago.
They’re going to come out hard, and we’re going to have to be better than we’ve been all season for sixty minutes.
I know we can do it.
That’s the thing that’s different tonight.
I know—not in the white-knuckled, force-it-into-existence way I used to know things, but in the way you know things when you’ve actually done the work.
I’ve watched this team gel together for three months.
I know what they’re capable of when they stop playing scared.
I know what Shep looks like when he’s locked in and what Holden does when the game opens up and exactly which of Gage’s pre-game rituals indicate he’s going to have a big night.
Gage has completed all of them. Twice.
We’re going to be fine.
“Cap.” Shep appears at my elbow in the tunnel, vibrating at a frequency I’ve only seen from him a handful of times. His eyes are too bright. He’s been this way since warmups. “How do you feel?”
“Ready.”
“Scale of one to ten.”
“Ready doesn’t have a scale, Shep.”
“I’m a nine,” he says, completely unprompted.
“Maybe a nine-point-five. I’ve been at an eight for most of the season but tonight I’ve got extra.
The extra is for us. For this.” He gestures broadly at the tunnel, the ice, the noise, the general concept of everything.
“The extra is because we’re going to win this game and go to the playoffs and it’s going to be because of you, even though I’m probably going to score the goal. ”
“Don’t jinx it.”
“I would never.” He’s already grinning. “I’ve got road flares in my bag, by the way. Just so you know.”
“Shep—”
“For the celebration. Obviously.”
“Where did you get road flares.”
“Hardware store. Same place as last time.” He taps the side of his helmet. “I’m consistent. It’s a virtue.”
Coach Duff appears at the mouth of the tunnel and silences both of us with a look that has been silencing locker rooms for decades. He doesn’t say anything elaborate. He looks at the ice, looks at us, and says: “Let’s go.”
The first period is exactly what I expected.
Springfield comes out hard, physical, trying to establish the pace before we can find our legs.
They’re good at this—grinding the early minutes, wearing teams down before the game opens up.
I’ve watched their tape enough times to dream about their forecheck, which is saying something because my dreams are usually about practice sequences and occasionally the Post-it board, which Gisele would find very funny and I’m never going to tell her.
We match them. That’s the part that’s new—not fighting their physicality but absorbing it, moving through it, trusting that the game will open up if we’re patient.
Three months ago I would have tightened the reins at the first sign of pressure.
Would have called adjustments, demanded sharper execution, looked for the variables I could control.
Tonight I let it breathe.
The first period ends zero-zero, which is fine. It’s more than fine. It means we didn’t give them anything cheap and we’ve still got everything in front of us.
Between the first and second, Slammy takes the ice.
I watch from the tunnel with Shep while the crowd does whatever it is they’re about to do, and what they’re about to do—I realize immediately—is exactly what I should have predicted.
Slammy skates to center ice. Produces a microphone from somewhere in the costume, which I’m still not sure is physically possible given the size of that hammer head. Raises both arms.
“SORROWVILLE,” Slammy announces, voice echoing through the building. “HOW ARE WE FEELING TONIGHT?”
The building responds with the sound of long-suffering fans who have been containing something enormous all season and have just been given permission to let it out.
“I SAID,” Slammy continues, with the energy of someone who has been waiting for this moment for months, “HOW. ARE. WE. FEELING?”
The crowd does not so much answer as detonate.
“HAPPY?” Slammy holds up a sign—hand-lettered, clearly made in advance, which means someone planned this, which means someone knew what they were doing when they put a feelings education program on a hockey captain—and the sign says, in large letters, HAPPY.
The arena loses its mind.
“ARE WE HAPPY, SORROWVILLE? THE DICHOTOMY IS NOT LOST ON THIS TOOL!”
Four thousand people confirm that yes, they are happy, with a volume that I’m fairly certain is audible from the parking lot. From two parking lots away. Possibly from Chicago.
“ARE WE DETERMINED?”
The crowd growls.
“ARE WE READY?”
The building shakes.
Beside me, Shep watches this with an expression I don’t entirely have words for. Something that lives in the same neighborhood as pride but isn’t quite that—something warmer and more personal, the look of a man who understands what he’s watching and why it matters.
“You know,” he says quietly, “six months ago you couldn’t have told me what happy felt like.”
“I could tell you what it felt like,” I say. “I just couldn’t say it out loud.”
He looks at me. “Can you now?”
I think about a purple Post-it note. About a woman in section 112 who drove to my rink on a Tuesday morning because someone told her to keep going.
About the specific weight of her hand in mine on the walk to the car and how it doesn’t feel like a risk anymore.
It just feels like the thing I come home to.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can now. And I wouldn’t even be lying.”
Shep nods once. Then he ruins it by adding: “Emotional growth arc complete. I expect some kind of certificate.”
“Get on the ice, Sawyer.”
The second period is better.
We find our game somewhere in the first five minutes—the passing starts to click, the positioning holds, and the guys stop thinking quite so hard about what’s at stake and start thinking about hockey, which is always when we play well.
Springfield is still good. They score at eight minutes on a shot that beats Gage clean off a defensive breakdown that I’m already filing away for film review.
We’re down one. There are thirty-two minutes left.
I don’t panic.
That’s the part that’s new. The old version of me would have pulled the reins so tight the guys couldn’t breathe. Would have gotten into it with Coach Duff. Would have called every play, micromanaged every line change, tried to personally control the outcome through sheer force of will.
Instead I get on the ice and I play my game and I trust the people around me.
Holden ties it at twelve minutes off a feed from Heath that’s one of the cleaner plays we’ve run all season. The bench erupts. I feel it in my chest—not just relief, but something bigger. Pride, maybe, in what these guys have become.
We go into the third period tied.
There’s one minute left in regulation when Coach Duff calls timeout.
The building is vibrating. I can feel it in the ice under my skates, in the boards when I lean against them, in the bones of a rink that has been home to this team for thirty years and knows what’s at stake tonight.
Coach looks at the clipboard. Looks at the ice. Looks at me.
“Foster. What do you see.”
He does this sometimes now—asks instead of tells. I don’t think he’d describe it that way. I don’t think he’s consciously decided to change his approach. But something shifted in this room over the past few months, and whatever it is, it lives in moments like this one.
I look at the ice.
Their left defenseman has been cheating toward the boards for the last six minutes, anticipating a play we keep almost running.
Their center is a step slow recovering after the last sequence—not injured, just tired in the third period the way tiresome players get tired when the game has been going this long.
There’s a lane. It’s been there for four minutes and nobody’s used it yet because we keep running the play we rehearsed instead of the play that’s actually available.
“Their left side is open,” I say. “Seventeen’s been cheating for the last two shifts. If we move it fast through the neutral zone and Shep times the cut—”
“Back door,” Shep says immediately as he winks. After all, that’s his specialty.
I don’t like to think about what that could mean outside this rink.
“You’ll have two steps on him.”
Coach looks at the board. Looks at me. Nods once.
“Do it clean,” he says.
The play takes eleven seconds from the drop of the puck.
I won’t remember all of it later—memory does strange things in certain moments, compresses and blurs and keeps only the images that matter.
What I’ll remember is the puck moving fast through the neutral zone the way I called it.
Holden making the pass he wasn’t sure he could make.
The lane opening up exactly where I said it would.
And Shep.
That glorious, bleach-blonde flow, Ric Flair loving bastard.
Shep timing the cut perfectly, hitting the back door at full speed, receiving the pass and releasing it in one motion with the complete confidence of a man who knew this was going to work before the play started.
The puck goes in.
Perfect catch. Here’s the paragraph to insert right before the Slammy sentence: