2
seconds left. Plenty of time for Springfield to make a move.
They pull their goalie before the puck even drops—extra attacker, six skaters against five, the last desperate move of a team that knows exactly what’s at stake.
The faceoff is mine. I win it clean, drawing it back to Holden, and the next forty-nine seconds are the longest of my life.
Springfield swarms. They’re good—they’re always good—and they throw everything at us with the focused urgency of a team that has nothing left to lose.
Gage makes two saves I’m going to watch on film for the rest of the week.
Heath blocks a shot with his body and doesn’t move for a second that stops my heart before he gets back up.
The puck squirts loose along the boards and Wolfe—quiet, steady, underestimated Wolfe who has been doing the unglamorous work all season without asking for recognition—gets there first and pins it in the corner with the relentless patience of a man who understands that sometimes winning just means not letting go.
He holds it. And holds it. The clock bleeds down. Ten seconds. Five. The horn sounds.
The building detonates.
I’ve been in arenas for big goals before.
Conference finals, overtime moments, the kind of goals that travel through a building like electricity.
This is different. This is personal. This is four thousand people who have been waiting all season for permission to believe, and the permission has finally arrived, and they are not going to waste it.
The bench clears.
Shep is already on his lap.
I’m going to go down to the hardware store and talk to the manager.
Nah, I’m going to stop asking. He’s skating in a wide circle around the ice with one in each hand, trailing red smoke like a man who has been planning this exact moment for months, which he absolutely has.
His battle cry echoes off the rafters. It echoes off the building. It probably echoes off Lake Superior.
“WOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Slammy comes out of the tunnel—I have no idea how Slammy is dressed and on skates this fast, this has been a recurring mystery all season and I’ve stopped trying to solve it—and joins the lap.
The crowd is on its feet. The scoreboard is running emoji faces that the AV team clearly had queued up and ready, which means someone believed this was going to happen.
I stand at the edge of it for a moment.
Just a moment.
I let myself feel it—not contain it, not file it away for later, not manage it into something smaller than it is.
The win. The season. The team that almost fell apart because their captain was holding everything so tight there was no room for anyone else.
The woman who walked into my practice with coffee and a bingo card and refused to accept the version of me I’d been performing for thirty years.
This is what she was working toward.
Not the Post-its or the breathing exercises or the bingo squares.
This. Right here. A man standing on the ice of a sold-out arena feeling something enormous and not running from it.
Shep completes his lap and crashes into me with the full force of a man who has been waiting all season for this exact celebration.
The pile-on begins. Bodies and pads and someone’s elbow in my ear and Gage yelling about finally, finally, about time, and Boone with his hand on the back of my neck the way he’s been doing since we were kids, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I am laughing.
Actually laughing. The kind that starts somewhere below your ribs and doesn’t care who hears it.
Eventually the pile thins. The ice gets cleared. Springfield lines up for the handshake, and we meet them at center with the respect that goes with it, because they played a good game and they’re a good team and winning means more when it’s earned.
After, when the celebration has moved to the locker room and the champagne Shep absolutely was not supposed to have has appeared from somewhere, I stand at the door to the ice for a moment.
Section 112. Six rows up.
She’s still there.
Of course she’s still there. She’s been in those seats for every home game since October. She was in the stands for the worst of it and she’s here for this and she’s wearing my number and she is the best thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
I don’t text her. Don’t mouth words across the rink.
I go find her.
Because that’s what you do when you have someone worth finding.
She sees me coming. Her face does the thing it does—the real smile, the one she saved for twelve years—and I close the distance between us and I hold on, right there in the emptying arena with the confetti still on the ice and Shep’s road flare smoke still hanging in the air.
“You did it,” she says against my shoulder.
“We did it.”
She pulls back. Looks at me. Her eyes are bright.
“How do you feel?”
The question she’s been asking since the beginning. The question that started all of it.
I don’t have to think about it.
“Happy,” I say.
Simple. True. Purple.
She laughs—surprised and real—and I kiss her, right there in section 112 with four thousand witnesses and Shep somewhere in the building still WOOOOOing and the whole long road from Main Street to this moment finally, completely behind us.
Playoffs, here come the Slammers.