8. Kieran
Kieran
At six in the morning I am on the ice, and I do not remember driving in.
The drive from Beacon Hill to the Seaport at that hour is a stretch of road I have driven so many times that, on the morning after a long day, my hands can do it without my attention.
The bag is on my shoulder. The skates are on my feet.
The call sheet from last night's coordinator meeting is in the breast pocket of the team-issued quarter-zip, and my left hip is announcing every cold pocket of air in the rink the way it announces every cold pocket of air in every rink I have stood on or skated on or coached in the back half of my career.
I take the ice for the morning skate.
The rink lights have just come up. The Zamboni is out the rear gate.
The first four players on the call sheet are already on the wing in their game-day routines, working their ankles into their skates the way men who have done it forty thousand times do.
Sasha Reznikov, captain-in-waiting, is moving from blue line to blue line with the slow, easy power of a man who has not yet had to be at full speed for anything in his life.
étienne is on a knee, taping the inside of his stick blade with his head tilted at the angle he learned in juniors and has not changed since.
Mikko skates up to me at the bench. He stops with the small, confident two-foot brake hockey players spend a decade learning, and he does not, at first, say anything.
He puts the end of his stick under the chin guard of my whistle and lifts.
"You look like shit."
"Thanks."
"Last drink?"
"Last drink was a glass of bourbon in October."
"Mm. Sleep?"
"Not last night."
He looks at me. There is a second question he wants to ask, but in nine years of knowing me, he has learned when not to ask it. He skates back to the drill line.
The coordinators do their work. The two assistants take the forwards through the standard pre-game flow drill on the far side.
Doyle has the goalies in their pre-game routine on the near net.
Three of the four Globe writers I expected to be in the rafters are in the rafters, and the fourth is downstairs in the press room waiting for the post-skate scrum.
My hip is tight by the second drill.
The drills run anyway. I demonstrate the breakout I want against Pittsburgh's third forecheck, push off twice on the left leg — the hip cracks softly the first time and does not the second — and the assistant on my right takes a half-step forward like he might need to catch me.
I look at him exactly once. For the rest of the practice, he does not do it again.
We finish the drills. We finish the special teams. We finish the line rushes.
At the end of the practice I send the team off to the room. Mikko, who has been in the league long enough to be eligible to coach any one of these practices, stays at center ice with his stick across his shoulders, looking at me.
I skate over to him.
"Coach."
"Mikko."
"You ran that breakout twice."
"I did."
"For the team, or for the hip?"
"Both."
He nods.
We skate to the gate together. The bench-side door opens to a hallway that has my office at the end of it and Greer's office two floors above it, and the pressroom one level below it. The hallway is full of staff. I am, in this hallway, the camera-on version of myself.
Mikko waits until we are clear of the staff. He waits until we are at the corner of the hallway where the staff routes split — players right to the room, coaches left to the offices — and he taps me on the shoulder pad and stops me before I make the left.
"Whatever it is," he says, "you can talk to me."
“Mikko."
"I am not asking. I am telling you the door is open."
I do not have a sentence for what he has just done for me.
I say, "Not yet."
He nods. He squeezes my shoulder pad. He goes right.
I go left.
The chair at my desk is the same chair I have had for four years.
The desk is the same desk. The small framed picture of Indie at her grad-school graduation is in the same corner Indie put it in the day I moved in.
Nothing in the office has changed in the last fourteen hours.
All of it feels, this morning, completely new.
I sit at my desk. The call sheet for the video review at mid-morning opens on the screen, and my hands flatten on the wood the way they have flattened on three thousand other call sheets in my career, in the practiced rhythm I learned from my first head coach in Hartford the year I was twenty-three and a player who needed to learn how to read.
The reading goes through me.
None of it sticks.
The video review goes ahead anyway. I sit with my four assistants in the dark room next to the locker hallway and let Doyle run the goalie-specific cuts of Pittsburgh's last three games at home, and let the offensive assistant talk through the wing-side adjustments he wants for the second period.
I nod at the things I am supposed to nod at.
I ask the questions I am supposed to ask.
Two of the questions are good ones. The assistants take them away.
When the video room empties out, my phone is face-down on the table where I put it when I sat down. I do not look at my phone during video reviews. Nobody on this staff has ever seen me do it.
I turn the phone over.
There is one new message on the screen.
I'm okay. Coach the game.
I read it once.
I read it twice.
I read it a third time, because the third time is the time when my throat unlocks.
I type okay with my thumb. I delete it. I type thank you instead. I delete that too. I sit with my hands on the phone and think about her at her desk two floors above me, and then I type:
You too. Eat something. I'll call you tomorrow.
I send it.
The phone, on the table, says she has read it before I have gotten back to my chair.
She does not write back.
***
The afternoon compresses into the sequence of meetings and pregame meals and tape sessions and short, hard walks through the hallway between my office and the coaches' room and the locker hallway and the bench tunnel.
The team eats. The team naps. The team gets taped.
The team is on the ice for the warm-up two and a half hours before puck drop.
I am on the bench in the team-issued game-night suit with my hands in my pockets, watching the warm-up the way I have watched a thousand warm-ups.
My left hip, by the time the warm-up ends, is sore but moving. The six-week follow-up Greer wrote into the file is the right call.
The arena fills. The anthem plays. The puck drops.
Pittsburgh wins the opening faceoff. Reznikov-Halonen does not, against their first line, close on the playmaker the way I wanted Mikko to close, and I flip the matchup to Tremblay-Halonen at the start of the second period, exactly the way I told Doyle I would.
The goalie has a feel by the second intermission.
He tells me so himself, at the door of the room, in two words and a small nod.
We score in the second. We score in the third.
Sasha gets his name on the third, with an assist to Mikko on a clean tape-to-tape pass at the back door that the writers will lead with in their stories.
Pittsburgh pulls within one, late. We win it on an empty-netter from étienne, who skates the puck along the boards with his head up, looking at the bench.
Looking, specifically, at me. He has given me that look every time he scores on an empty net at home for six years, and for six years it has been the part of his game I have liked the most.
The final horn goes.
The Barons win, 4 to 2.
The handshakes happen. The press scrum happens.
I say the things every head coach in this league says after a win.
The truth is that between the puck drop and the horn I did not think about Greer Callahan for two consecutive minutes, and the relief of that is a relief I have not earned and do not, professionally, deserve.
I take it anyway.
Routine is, when nothing else in your life will hold you up, the thing that holds you up.
I drive home close to midnight.
Inside, on the bench by the door, the leather bag goes down. The coat goes on the hook.
On the kitchen counter, the small lamp Cara picked out is on.
I do not, for a long second, remember turning it on.
Then I do.
The lamp turns off under my hand.
The stairs are dark.
I do not look at my phone again until the morning.