Chapter 29
Black Belt
~IRIS~
Seven to five in overtime.
That is, on the small dry scoreboard of the small private archive of my entire goalie career to date, the number I am going to be sitting with for an indeterminate stretch of nights, possibly the rest of the calendar year, possibly forever.
Two.
Two shots in the last ninety seconds of regulation.
The first one a wrist-shot from the high slot that the post-side glove should, on every available metric, have been there for.
The second one a wrap-around from the back of the net by their senior-tier captain, who is, on the small private accounting of the small senior-leagues commentariat, the kind of forward who manufactures wrap-around goals out of structural inevitability.
I read the wrap. I read the shoulder. I committed. The puck still hit the back of the net.
Goalie. Pipes. Glove. Five-hole. The wall.
The wall, on the seventh of those seven, was not the wall.
The locker room is, around me at the small folding bench against the back wall, very, very quiet.
The kind of quiet that the small public-facing internet calls the room after, the small thick silence of fifteen Alphas in damp gear and unfastened pads sitting with the precise interior recalibration of a roster that has, in the past nine minutes, lost a game it had no business being inside of in the first place.
Sweat. Cold-wet pad foam. The chemical-citrus of the linoleum cleaner from this morning. The small coppery undertone of the dressing tape on every wrist in the room. The dark malted release of a single popped energy drink someone has cracked at the far bench.
I have, in the past sixteen minutes, pulled off my gear in the precise unhurried automatic order of a goalie who can do the small undress in her sleep, swapped into my joggers and the soft pink-grey heather T-shirt I packed for the post-game flight home, and laced up my running shoes with the precise small ritual of a woman planning to slip out the locker-room door, walk the long carpeted corridor back to the visitor-team hotel, and sit, in the small private dark of the bathtub of the suite, for the small forty-five-minute private appointment with my own brain that the small dry inner accounting of a 7-5 OT loss requires.
Iris O’Shea, exit strategy in motion. Bag in hand. Three steps. The door is right there. Three steps. Two steps.
Coach Declan O’Rourke is in the doorway.
Cedarwood, black coffee, winter whiskey, the small leather-and-snow-on-wool layered under it all. The precise scent of safety that my body, against every conscious decision I have made about the man in the past forty-five days, files involuntarily on contact.
His grey-green eyes flick to my bag.
“O’Shea.”
Damn.
“Coach.”
“Sit down.”
“I was, in fact, planning to —”
“Sit. Down. O’Shea.”
Yes, Coach. Filed.
I sit back down on the bench, the precise small five-feet-from-the-door bench, in the small dignified pout of an Omega who has, on the small inner accounting of the past sixteen minutes, just had her exit strategy professionally vetoed by a senior tier of authority.
Coach Declan walks into the room.
The fifteen Alphas in front of him sit up a quarter-inch. The small unhurried thing that always happens, in any room where Coach Declan O’Rourke walks in, in fact, happens, which is that the small private ambient atmosphere of the room is, in two strides of his, reorganized.
“Okay,” Coach Declan says, mildly, planting himself in the small dead-center of the locker room and looking, slow and even, at every single body in front of him in turn. “Let us, in the orderly way we always do this, dissect.”
He starts at sector one.
He works through the line, body by body.
Brennan: the small dropped-shoulder defensive lapse at the eleven-minute mark of the first that opened the back-door pass that became their second goal.
Voss: the small undisciplined penalty at the four-minute mark of the second that put us on a two-minute kill and gifted them the power-play marker.
The full sector-one line, on the small unblinking surgical hand of a man who has, in his head, the small forensic frame-by-frame of every shift of the game tape, by name, by infraction.
They sit. They take it. The small thick-necked Alpha resignation of a sector that has, for the past seven minutes, been preparing in advance for this specific tongue-lashing.
Then he turns to me.
Brace, O’Shea. The seventh wrap-around is, professionally, a goalie’s failure. Take it. Document it. File it. Walk it up the post-side glove drill at four in the morning tomorrow. Do not, in this room, on this bench, in front of this assembled body, allow yourself to flinch.
“Out of every Alpha in this room,” Coach Declan says, with the small unhurried captain-coach cadence of a man laying a clean public sentence in the small ambient air of the locker room, “Miss O’Shea had the best individual performance of any body on this roster tonight.”
Wait.
Wait, what.
My head snaps up.
The sector-one half of the line, simultaneously, snaps up.
“Excuse me?” Brennan says, halfway through the small re-wrap of his right wrist tape, the small wounded honest disbelief of a man receiving the precise opposite of the post-game lecture he had budgeted for. “Coach. With respect. She let in seven.”
“Mm,” Coach Declan agrees, mildly. “On approximately fifty-three shots on net, which is, by the small archived metric of the public NCAA database, the most a goalie in our league has faced in a single regulation-plus-overtime period of play in eight calendar years. The save percentage is, on the small dry arithmetic of the situation, in fact considerably better than league baseline.”
He pulls a small black remote out of the inside pocket of his coaching jacket. He turns. He aims it at the wall-mounted television above the bench at the back of the room.
The screen, mid-shutdown loop on the small post-game scoreboard, brightens.
The first replay clip pulls up at two-x speed.
“Observe,” Coach Declan says, evenly. “One-thirty-seven into the first.”
On the screen, the senior-tier number-eleven of the opposing roster cuts in from the right wing and releases a wrist-shot from the high slot at the precise mid-eighty-mile-an-hour velocity for which his country-wide reputation has, since his sophomore year, been documented in the small senior commentariat archives.
I, on the screen, drop the left hip, square the post-side glove a quarter-beat before the wrist-shot is even released, and rob him clean.
“Glove,” Coach Declan narrates. “On a shot the league commentary tracker calls statistically unstoppable at this distance. Next clip.”
Clip two. A senior-tier defenseman pinches in. He releases the point shot. He gets a small redirect off the heel of his own forward at the top of the crease. I square. I read the deflection. I close the five-hole a small clean millisecond before the puck hits the post.
“Post,” Coach Declan says, in the small flat unimpressed tone of a man who would, in fact, prefer the goalie to have caught the puck cleanly but is, on the small inner accounting, going to take what was given. “Next.”
Clip three. Clip four. Clip five.
He walks the entire room, save by save, through fifteen specific stops that nobody at the post-game wrap on the bus was, in the small unhurried accounting of human nature, going to give me credit for.
“In the absence,” Coach Declan says, evenly, lowering the remote, “of the goalie performance you have just observed on this screen, the final score on tonight’s game was, on the small back-end statistical projection I ran during the bus ride, in fact fifteen to five.
We would have lost in regulation by approximately ten goals.
Thanks to the goalie performance you have just observed on this screen, we exited regulation tied at five-five, against a senior-tier roster that has played for the national title four years running and includes four players who are, on the publicly accessible Bauer scouting reports, going to be in the Stanley Cup draft pool inside the next eighteen months. ”
“So,” Brennan says, slow now, the small wounded recalibration of a man who has just received a piece of professional information he did not have ten seconds ago. “We lost. By two.”
“We lost,” Coach Declan agrees, “by two. In overtime. After exhausting them and being structurally exhausted, in turn, by them, in fact, exhausting our goalie. The two-goal margin in overtime is, on the small dry math, the goal-differential that the rest of the roster, gentlemen, failed to provide for her. Captain Kavanagh, winger Santori, and defenseman Bellerose, between them, in fact had to bridge a measurable section of the work that was structurally assigned to the rest of you for the duration of regulation. You can, on the replay, observe the gap. I will, in the interest of pacing, not narrate the gap clip by clip. The gap is, on the public record of this television, visible.”
Sector one stiffens.
“Okay,” Hargrove says, slowly, his back ramrod straight on his bench, the small careful tone of an Alpha about to commit, in front of a senior-tier coach, to a position he is, in fact, professionally too afraid to commit to but is too embarrassed not to.
“You are, with respect, playing favorites, Coach.”
“Oh.” Coach Declan’s eyebrow does the small dry millimeter. “Am I.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
Hargrove’s mouth opens. He clamps it back shut. The small wounded silence of a man who has, in fact, started a sentence without budgeting the second half of it.
Voss does it for him.
Voss, on the bench beside Hargrove, lifts his head.
The small dry bored bored-bored sneer of a man who has, in the small private register of his own brain, been waiting all season to deploy the sentence in question and has, in this exact moment, decided that the post-OT-loss locker room is, in fact, the room to deploy it.