Chapter 31 #2
Playoff hockey, it turned out, was a different animal entirely.
The regular season was a marathon — eighty-two games, a grind, hockey woven into the ordinary rhythm of the week.
The playoffs were something else. Every game felt like the end of the world.
The building was louder, the hits were harder, the whole city seemed to lean toward the arena like a plant toward light.
They gave out white towels and the entire building waved them in unison and it did something primal to your nervous system that I could not have explained to my own mother.
Speaking of whom.
“Explain the towels again,” my father said, waving his with the game but visibly unsure why.
“You don’t have to understand the towels, Herb,” my mother said. “You just wave the towels.”
“I’m waving the towels. I’d like to know why I’m waving the towels.”
“It’s a rally thing, Dad,” I said. “It’s for energy.”
“Ah.” He considered this, waving. “It’s working. I feel very energized. I also feel like I might have a heart attack. Are these two things related?”
My parents had driven up from Kansas City for the playoffs.
This was, in itself, a small miracle — my father did not travel casually, considered any drive over three hours a personal affront, and had spent my entire childhood declaring that he would watch things perfectly well from his own recliner, thank you.
And yet here he was, Herb Calloway, in a Blaze T-shirt that my mother had clearly purchased for him against his will, waving a towel he didn’t understand for a hockey team he’d started following specifically because a young man was dating his daughter.
That was the thing about my father. He grumbled about everything and showed up for everything. The grumbling was how you knew he cared. If Herb Calloway ever stopped complaining about something, that was when you worried.
Whatever reservations he’d walked into Christmas with had not survived the trip. Herb Calloway was a Blaze fan now. He would have denied it under oath.
The Ewings were two rows down.
Mark and Barbara had driven in from Ames for the playoffs the same way they did everything that mattered to Carter — without being asked, and without any intention of missing a minute.
Barbara and my mother had locked in at Christmas and never really unlocked.
They’d bonded over loving impossible men and worrying about grown children who didn’t want to be worried about. Now they sat together comparing notes like they’d known each other for decades.
Mark and my father had arrived at something else entirely. They didn’t talk much. They didn’t need to. They watched the game in companionable silence, broken only by the occasional shared groan at a missed call.
And Justin.
Justin was having, without exaggeration, the greatest experience of his young life.
He’d been to regular-season games, but the playoffs had elevated him to a state of near-religious ecstasy.
He wore his number nine jersey — the newer, larger one, the old one having grown mercifully snug — and he had a rally towel of his own that he waved with such violent commitment that he’d twice nearly taken out the man beside us.
He’d learned things. Alarming quantities of things. He now had opinions about line combinations. He’d started saying “we” — we need to shoot more, we’re playing too soft in the neutral zone — with the authority of a man who’d been watching the game for forty years instead of six.
“Justin,” Barbara said, delighted, at one point, “where did you learn ‘neutral zone’?”
“Carter taught me,” Justin said, not taking his eyes off the ice. “He says I have good hockey instincts.”
“He does say that,” I confirmed. He said it often, actually, and Justin repeated it to strangers.
They won the first round in five games.
Four wins, one loss, done in five. No seven-game grind, no elimination night, no watching Carter come off the ice with that gray, hollowed-out look. Just four wins and a handshake line.
The building emptied that night absolutely buzzing, everybody already talking about the second round like it was owed to us.
One round down. I couldn’t tell you what that did to the guys, but I know exactly what it did to me: I stood in that loud, emptying arena with Justin hanging off my arm hollering about the neutral zone, and I felt like part of something.
Carter found us in the family area after, still in his under-armor with his hair wet, and Justin launched at him at full speed the way he always did, and Carter caught him one-armed and pulled me into his other side and kissed the top of my head, and my father shook his hand and said something gruff and approving about the third-period forecheck, and Barbara cried a little, and my mother watched all of it with an expression I chose not to examine too closely because I was having enough feelings already.
“Second round,” Carter said, into my hair, low, just for me. “You coming to all of them?”
“Every single one.”
“Even the away games?”
“I’ll watch the away games from your couch with Justin and Carter Junior,” I said — and felt him go still for a second at the easiness of it, the way he still did, every time. Like it startled him, being spoken about as a given. As somebody’s regular Tuesday.
“Okay,” he said, rough. “Okay. Good.”
I stood in that hallway with playoff confetti still stuck to the floor and my whole loud collected family around me and let myself have all of it.
Justin was asleep on his feet against Carter’s side.
Two sets of parents who had never expected to know each other were making plans to get dinner.
And the man I loved had just won a playoff series and come straight to us with it, before the reporters, before his own celebration — straight down the tunnel to find the three of us in a hallway.
Everything was still ahead of us, and all of it was good.