Chapter 25 Riley - 2022–2023
Two seasons went by in the costume and I watched them from about a hundred yards off.
I did not follow it, and I knew within about four days every single time it happened. It came at me off airport televisions, off the lock screens of guys sitting next to me on planes, and off a phone Angelo Ricci once held up in a handshake line, which I have decided to forgive him for.
I treated it like weather in a city I was not in. I checked it constantly.
He gave ninety seconds at a podium and thanked the organization and the guys who had it before him. It was flawless and it was empty.
I did not send anything. I stood under that television until they went to a commercial
The other tab was still there, the muted one.
Philadelphia's postgame availabilities, four nights a week, and I unmuted it for the quarter breath, and I only did that on my own bad nights, which was a rule I invented and then adjusted until it did not mean anything, and by the end of 2022 my own bad nights included nights we won.
My own account stayed clean the whole time, which nobody ever asked about and which was, I think, the loudest thing about me for two years.
Hibbing volunteered candidates. Kayla had a cousin, Dex's mother had a hygienist. There was a woman at the Pit Stop in the summer of 2022 who was funny and kind and a great deal better than I deserved, and I bought her a drink and made her laugh for an hour and then said goodnight in a parking lot, and she looked at me like she was reading something I had not written down.
My mother stopped relaying them somewhere in there. She used to open a phone call with three sentences about somebody's daughter, and then one Wednesday she just did not, and she has never done it since, and neither of us has ever mentioned that she stopped.
Moose formally declined to comment.
"I have noticed a pattern."
"Don't."
"I have decided not to observe it," Moose said. "There is a difference between a thing being visible and a man choosing to look, and I am choosing not to look, and I want you to know that this is costing me."
"Thank you, Ludvig."
"It is very difficult," he said. "I am extremely observant."
Nobody in either dressing room ever said one word about the fact that Riley Kowalski, twenty-seven years old, top six winger, unmarried, in a sport where this is a spectator event, had not been with anybody in three years. There was nothing to say that the box scores did not already say better.
Then in 2023 we won the whole thing.
We were seventh in the conference and went sixteen and seven.
Seven overtime games. I played the second round on a foot that had a thing in it that I let them freeze before every game and which I haven't thought about since.
I had twenty-eight points in twenty-three games and a nine-game stretch from the second round into the conference final where I could see the play about a second before it happened.
It has arrived twice in my life and I've never once been able to send for it.
Game Six of the Final, on the road, up one with four minutes left. I forechecked their number four into his own corner and took it off him and put it in the far side, and the guy on the national feed said, "That is not a forecheck, that is a mugging in broad daylight."
Which is a thing I said out loud about myself in a bar in Philadelphia in October of 2017, to a man in a suit who had come to the hotel.
The horn went and the whole bench came over the wall and I got buried under six guys against the boards and somebody's helmet hit me in the mouth.
They gave the Cup to our captain and he skated it and gave it to Moose, who is a good man and who lifted it just off his own hands like a guy taking a casserole out of an oven, and then Moose turned around and put it in my arms.
I've been asked what it weighs. It weighs thirty-four and a half pounds and it doesn't feel like that. It feels like nothing and then it feels like a lot. I lifted it.
And the on-ice camera got a beat of something in there that has been screengrabbed since, and I know exactly what it is, because I've watched it once, in a hotel room in July, and then never again.
There is a moment a few seconds after I get it. I'm at the blue line with the thing over my head and the confetti coming down, and I turn, and the camera is on my face in close, and for one beat I look at the tunnel.
That's where the families come out. There is a gap in the boards by the tunnel and they hold the wives and the parents and the kids there in a little pen with a guy in a jacket, and when the whistle goes they open it and let them onto the ice.
My mother and father were in that pen. So was Dex, who paid his own way and would not discuss it.
I looked at the tunnel for one beat with the Stanley Cup over my head, and I was not looking at any of them.
Then the grin came back on, and I went and found my dad.
They put my coronation on television and my guy narrated it.
Grant Sinclair on the desk, in a good suit, hands flat, with a graphic of my face beside his.
"This is a wonderful night for hockey," he said.
"You cannot watch this and not be moved by it.
And I want to say something about Riley Kowalski, because I have been hard on him and I stand by every word.
That is a triumph of will over ceiling. That's what you're watching.
That is a young man who has taken everything he was given and gotten every ounce out of it, and there are not ten men in this league with that motor, and you do not get to a June like this without it. "
The woman to his left, who had been doing this for years and had never once been given her due, put her pen down.
"Grant, he was second in the league in controlled zone entries this season. He's got twenty-eight points in twenty-three playoff games and a plus fourteen against top competition. At what point does a guy get to stop being a motor and start being good?"
There was a second of a man in a good suit not having anything.
"Well, sure," said Grant Sinclair, "the numbers are terrific."
That clip did millions on its own. It outlived the parade. There are guys who watched that clip who could not name who we beat.
I watched it in a hotel bathroom at four in the morning with the fan on and my ears going, and what I felt was not triumph either.
There is a piece of paper taped inside a stall door in Pittsburgh that has been there since September of 2017, and a second one beside it since October of 2018, and I haven't believed either of them since about 2020, and I've never once been able to work out when they stopped working.
The morning before we flew north, before dawn, I put the Cup in the back of my truck and drove out past the turnpike to Stan's.
I had it for a day. There was a man from the Hall who traveled with it and slept in the same building as it, and he came with me at five in the morning without asking a single question.
Stan was there, the way he had been at five in the morning since before I was born. He came out from behind the counter and looked at the thing in my arms, and then he went and unlocked the rink doors and put the lights on, all of them, which I've never once seen him do.
Then he pointed at the ice. He had flooded it. It was fresh and wet and shining, no marks on it at all, and he pointed at it with one whole hand, palm up, like a man showing off a cathedral.
"Stan." He shrugged.
I got two twenties out and he looked at them and then looked at me and put both hands in his pockets, which in that man's language was an entire speech with a standing ovation at the end of it.
So I carried the Stanley Cup out onto a fresh sheet of ice in a building with a roof from another era and a scoreboard where the number three had not lit since before I got there.
I set it down at center in my street shoes and stood next to it, and there was nobody in the building but me, Stan, and a guy from the Hall standing by the gate with his hands folded.
I stayed out there a long time.
On the way out I stopped at the counter, because the notebook was open.
Spiral bound, pen on a string, and the pages went back years because nobody had ever thrown one away. I stood there and turned it back, which took a while, and I found the page.
There was one line on it, in December of 2019.
It was in block capitals, printed fast, the way a man signs for a package.
N. Ellis.
Under it was nothing. There was a blank space where a second name should have been, because on the 17th of December, 2019, a pen was set down on an open page and turned so the end of it pointed at me, and I put my hands in my coat pockets and said something about my fingers being cold.
I turned to the current page and picked up the pen and wrote the date, and the words Stanley Cup, and then I signed it.
H. Baker.
I've signed that book every summer since 2017 and every single one of those says B.
Baker. I changed the letter the first night because I hadn't earned the other one, and because I was twenty-two, and because if I was going to steal a dead man's name I could at least have the decency to put a fake mustache on it.
I did not change it that morning. I stood at that counter with thirty-four and a half pounds of trophy under my left arm and wrote the real letter, and I did not stop to think about it for one second before I did it, and it took me until the parking lot to understand what I had done.
Stan turned the book around and read it. He read the whole line, the date and the trophy and the name, at his own speed, and then he turned the book back and put his hand over the pen. He has never said one word about it, not that morning and not any morning since.
Cup Day in Hibbing was the 28th of June and it started at the plant.