Chapter 18
Overtime
~IRIS~
“And we are live, folks, from the Whitfield Arena, where in just under three minutes the North Star Wolves will host their season-opening exhibition against the visiting Saint Aldwin Knights. A capacity crowd tonight, which is a remarkable showing for a preseason game, and — Jim, this is the part everyone has been waiting on — in net for the Wolves, making her North Star debut, is sophomore-year transfer Iris O’Shea.
“That is correct, Brian. O’Shea, originally out of West Yorkshire, England, and the first — yes, you heard me, the first — Omega goaltender ever rostered to a Division One men’s program at this institution.”
The announcers’ voices come through the rafters of the arena with the warm, overproduced cadence of two men who have practiced the sentence in front of a mirror, and the sound of it travels down through the steel of the crease, up through the blades of my skates, and into the small busy chamber behind my sternum where the entire pre-game machinery of my nervous system has, for the past nineteen minutes, been doing its work.
I am not going to look at the crowd.
I am not going to look at the crowd. I am going to look at the puck.
I am going to look at the goal line. I am going to look at the half-circle of paint at my feet and the back-cage of my net and the small precise topography of my own crease, which is, on every rink I have ever stood in, exactly twelve feet of painted floor that nobody else gets to touch unless I let them.
Crease. Pipes. Glove. Blocker. Five-hole closed. Breathe in. Breathe out.
The arena smells of ten thousand things at once.
Cold ice and the chemical pine of the disinfectant on the boards.
Salted popcorn from the concourse. Hot rubber from the warming pucks.
Beer in plastic cups. The layered citrus-and-cologne fog that drifts off any sold-out crowd.
Underneath it all, on the home bench at my one o’clock, the unmistakable triple-stacked scent signature of three Alphas I have started to recognize as a unit before I have seen them — amber bourbon, burnt-orange espresso, pine and snow — grounding the whole electric chemistry of the room in something I do not, by any rational measure, have the right to find this calming.
Goalies. Focus.
I let my eyes drift to the stands. Just for one second. Just a sweep. Just to confirm we are, as I suspected, drawing a crowd.
We are.
And the part of the crowd that knocks the breath sideways in my chest, briefly, is the small constellation of Omegas dotted through the lower bowl in numbers I have not, in my entire career, seen at a men’s hockey game before.
A girl in a knit beanie in section twelve.
A pair of older women in matching North Star scarves directly behind the home bench.
A row of college-aged Omegas with painted faces and homemade signs in section nine.
They came.
They actually came.
Two days ago you were a tagged TikTok clip of a girl in pads doing a top-shelf glove save and a kid named @hockeygirly_22 stitched you with the caption THIS IS THE OMEGA WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR.
Two-point-one million views by Sunday lunch.
Most of the comments crying. A nontrivial percentage of them screaming.
It had caught me utterly off guard on my own couch on Sunday night.
I had been on the very far end of an evening doom-scroll, the kind you promise yourself is fifteen minutes and that turns into ninety, when the algorithm had served me, with neither warning nor mercy, a thirty-second video of myself in full pads making a glove-hand save in the corner of practice last Tuesday, the lighting somehow so flattering it had pulled my cheekbones and the line of my jaw and the angle of the catch into something that looked, frankly, professionally engineered to make a teenage Omega want to play goalie.
The boys had been hysterically proud of it.
Matteo had texted me a screenshot of his story repost within ninety seconds.
Rémi had simply sent the word badass. Jude had not commented for an hour, and then had texted, brand. Just the one word.
And tonight, a few hundred Omegas have shown up to a North Star exhibition game who would not, six months ago, have considered the building a place that wanted them in it.
Goalie. Focus. Crease. Pipes.
The puck drops.
And, for the first ten minutes of regulation, I am playing a perfectly competent, perfectly forgettable game of professional hockey, the kind of game a half-decent goalie plays in a half-decent crease at the start of any season-opener, while every man in a blue pinnie on my own bench openly roots against me.
Not loud. They are not stupid. Loud would put it on a clip.
Just constant. A muttered chirp every time I drop into the butterfly.
A snort when I tracking-save a shot that did not deserve a save anyway.
A theatrical eye-roll from Brennan every time the lane in front of my net clears and I have not done anything cinematic with the opportunity.
The half of my own team that I am ostensibly defending the back of has, by the eight-minute mark, become a small private peanut gallery, and I am letting it slide off me because I have been a girl in a boys’ league since I was nine years old and I have, by now, an industrial-grade callus where another goalie’s feelings would be.
Twelve minutes into the first, a Saint Aldwin winger snaps a shot from the top of the circle. Routine. Should be a save. I drop, I close, I get the pad on it.
Except I do not.
The puck slides under my left pad on the ice, hits the post, and rolls in, in the small undignified way pucks roll in only on the goals that will end up on the highlight reel of your worst games for the rest of your career.
One-nothing. Saint Aldwin.
Brennan, on the bench, smirks. He does not need to say a word. The smirk is the sentence.
Oh, no. Oh, no, you absolute donkey, that was a stoppable puck, get up.
I lift my mask off my forehead, knock my glove against my pipes, and step out of my crease to scrape it down.
I do not look at the bench. I do not look at the Omega section.
I look at the Zamboni doors at the far end of the arena and I run, in my head, the count I have run before every soft goal of my entire goaltending career.
One. The goal happened. Two. It is now in the past. Three. The next puck is in the future. Four. Get back in the crease.
I get back in the crease.
The whistle blows.
And something, between the moment the whistle goes and the moment the puck drops, shifts.
Jude wins the next faceoff.
Clean. The kind of faceoff win you only get from a centerman who has spent fifteen years studying the dot, a small precise theft of the puck before the opposing center has finished settling his blade, and the puck is back through his legs and onto the tape of Matteo at the half-boards before any of us, including Saint Aldwin, has finished registering the trick.
Matteo carries.
Rémi, on the back end, reads the rush before it happens.
He does the thing he has been doing in practice for two weeks that I have, until this moment, half-suspected I was imagining — he steps up at exactly the line that severs the Saint Aldwin breakout from itself, lays a clean shoulder into their second forward, and the resulting hit rattles the glass with a low boomed concussion that the announcers will reference twice in the post-game wrap.
The puck pops free. Matteo collects.
And the Wolves are off, the way the Wolves were always supposed to be off, the way Coach Declan has been telling us for two weeks this team is engineered to be, and Saint Aldwin spends the rest of the period chasing them.
Which is the part where my game changes.
Because the second the geometry of the ice in front of me is correct — the second sector-two is actually doing the work it was built to do, the lanes getting cut, the angles collapsed, my defensemen stepping up the way Rémi just stepped up — my crease becomes the room I have known how to live in since I was eleven years old.
The puck stops being a threat that will leak through the gaps and becomes the small black object I have spent ten thousand hours learning the trajectories of, and the seven shots that come at me in the rest of the period die into my pads, into my glove, into my chest, into the rebounded zone outside the crease where Rémi or whichever defenseman is on the ice clears them before any opposing forward has time to capitalize.
Second period buzzer.
Seven for seven. Hold the line.
On the bench between periods, Matteo squirts a stream of water at the front of my mask, grins through the cage at me, and says, in the very specific casual register of a winger who has clocked his goalie locking in, “There she is.”
I do not answer. I do not need to.
I am, on the inside, already in the third.
The third opens with Saint Aldwin one goal up and very aware of it, and they spend the first six minutes of the period throwing everything they have at my net in the not-unreasonable expectation that the Omega will, eventually, fold.
She does not fold.
Eleven shots in the first six minutes of the third.
I stop all eleven. The crowd, by the second flurry, has started doing the small expectant intake of breath every time a Saint Aldwin shot is in flight and the explosive exhale of release every time the puck dies into my body, and somewhere up in section nine the row of college-aged Omegas with the painted faces has started to scream after every save.
Brennan, on the bench, has stopped smirking.
With four minutes left, Jude crashes the net on a Matteo dish from the slot, ties the game on a tip-in that the goalie at the other end will be replaying for the rest of his career, and the Whitfield Arena loses its mind.
Regulation ends one-one.
Overtime.