Sully
Three minutes left.
We're up by one, and I have never wanted anything less complicated in my life than the next three minutes.
My legs are gone. That's fine, everybody's legs are gone.
Emmett's everywhere, blocking shots, barking, dragging us up the ice by sheer force of will.
Every one of us would run through a wall for him, he knows it, and he's using it.
Pierre and Felix are playing like men possessed.
Evan is calm, Evan is always calm, the freak, like this is a morning skate and not the last three minutes of everything.
Me, I just don't let anything through. That's my whole job tonight.
Don't be the reason.
Kill the play, eat the puck, block the lane, get it out.
Simple, every time I climb over those boards I think one thing.
Don't be the reason you lose the cup.
I get about forty seconds, and I'm back on the bench with my lungs on fire, watching Evan's pair do the same job, counting down the clock and hating every second I'm not out there.
That's the thing nobody understands about the end of a game like this.
Half of it you spend sitting down, useless, watching.
Two minutes.
Coach taps me back out.
Everything shrinks down to the ice, the puck, and the five of us.
They come at us hard, their guy gets in behind me down the left side.
I don't know how I get back, but I do, stick down, body between him and the net, and I take the puck off him at the last possible second and chip it out over the blue line.
My legs are screaming. Somewhere above me, the building makes a noise I feel in my teeth.
We get the change on the fly. I'm barely on the bench before a whistle blows.
One minute.
They pull their goalie.
Emmett looks down the bench at me and jerks his chin, and I'm over the boards before I've thought about it, because when it's the last minute of a one-goal game seven, you send your shutdown pair out and you keep them out.
Six on five.
Six skaters coming at us like a wave, and the puck's moving too fast to track.
My heart is going to come out of my chest. I get a stick in a lane, and it stings all the way up my arm, and I don't care.
They press, and press again. And then their guy winds up from the top of the circle, and Emmett, our captain, throws himself in front of it.
The puck cracks off his shin pad. It skitters into the corner, and Felix is there, and he scoops it up and fires it the length of the ice at an empty net.
And it slides.
And slides.
And it goes in.
The buzzer.
The red light.
And the noise that comes down out of that building is like nothing I have ever heard in my life.
We won.
We won the Cup.
I don't remember dropping my gloves or my stick, and then I'm at the bottom of a pile of twenty grown men. Someone's elbow is in my throat, someone's screaming in my ear, and somebody's definitely crying, and it might be me.
We untangle, and Emmett's got his helmet off, hair plastered to his head, grinning so hard it looks painful. He turns and finds Jo in the family section and points right at her and mouths I love you, and she mouths it straight back with tears streaming down her face.
And that's when I look up too. She's there, hands pressed over her mouth, absolutely sobbing, with Cassidy screaming beside her.
She's looking straight at me.
Not at the ice, not at Emmett, not at the chaos.
At me.
And I stand there in the middle of the best moment of my professional life with my heart going like a hammer, and I smile at her.
And she smiles back.
They bring the Cup out, and we go crazy. There's the commissioner's speech that none of us hear a word of. Then they call Emmett's name.
The roar that goes up shakes my ribs. Emmett lifts it over his head and skates it around, showing every section of the building, and then he stops in front of the family section and lifts it higher.
I have known that man since we were kids in Wisconsin, and I have never seen his face do that before.
He passes it to Pierre. Pierre takes it and just stands there for a second, and you can see it land on him, all of it, everything he's given up and everything last year cost him.
His wife had their baby, and he played this whole final on no sleep at all.
He lifts it over his head with tears absolutely pouring down his face.
Then Felix, and the two of them end up wrapped around each other off to the side, both shaking, two brothers who came here together and did the thing they came to do.
Then it goes around, man by man, each of us getting our moment.
Fish gets his and does the dance.
And then it's mine.
They hand me the Cup. It's heavier than you think and lighter than it should be, and it's warm from everyone else's hands.
And before I lift it, I kiss it.
I don't plan it, it just happens, my mouth against cold silver, and then I put it over my head, and the sound comes down, and for about four seconds I am completely and totally empty of everything except this.
Nine years old, a garage door in Wisconsin with a milk crate full of pucks and a stick two sizes too big, and my dad yelling at me to come in for dinner while I told him one more, one more, one more.
I did it.
I pass it on.
Then security starts bringing the families out onto the ice.
Rubber mats appear, and cameras, and champagne from absolutely nowhere.
Suddenly, the ice is full of wives and kids and parents, all of them crying, and Bouch has already got the Cup back and is drinking out of it, which he will do again later, twice, on camera.
Collette gets to Fish, and he lifts her clean off her feet and spins her.
Jo is wrapped around Emmett like she's never letting go.
Pierre's got his phone up, FaceTiming Issy in her hospital bed with Alby, holding the screen out so she can see the ice.
He's crying, and she's crying, and half the team keeps leaning into the shot to yell at her.
And I'm standing there in the middle of it all, soaked in champagne, with my heart going, looking for one person.
My parents find me first.
Mom gets to me before Dad does, and she's crying so hard she can't get a word out.
She grabs my face in both hands and looks at me like she did when I was nine and came off the ice with my first hat trick.
Dad hugs me so hard my ribs creak, and he doesn't say anything either, because Sullivan men are useless.
Then he pulls back, looks at me, and says, “Connor,” in a voice I've never heard him use, and that nearly finishes me.
“I know,” I say. “I know, Dad.”
I hug them both again, already looking over their heads, scanning. Mom notices because she notices everything.
“Are you looking for someone, love?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
And I don't even think about it, it just comes out. “The woman I love.”
My parents both go very still.
“The what?” Dad says.
“Connor Sullivan,” Mom says. “Who?”
But I'm not listening anymore, because I've found her. She's about twenty feet away in the chaos, standing there in the middle of all these people, champagne everywhere, and she's not looking at the Cup or the cameras or any of it.
She's looking at me.
And she's crying, and she's smiling, and she doesn't look away.
I don't remember crossing that ice, but I push myself through the middle of my own celebration as if it isn't happening. Past Bouch, past a cameraman who has to jump out of my way, and I get to her, and she's saying my name, just starting to say something, and I don't let her finish.
I take her face in both my hands, and I kiss her.
In front of everybody. In front of her brother, my sister, both our families, twenty thousand people, and about nine cameras.
I kiss her like I've wanted to since I was seventeen and too much of a coward to tell her.
She kisses me back, her hands fisted in the front of my jersey, pulling me down, kissing me back like she's been waiting to.
Somewhere behind us somebody whoops. Somebody else shouts something.
But it's Cup night, and the ice is full of people crying, kissing, and screaming, and two more of us doing it doesn't even register.
When I finally pull back, she's got her forehead against mine, and she's crying properly now.
“I'm sorry,” she whispers. “I'm so sorry it took me so long to come back to you.”
“Em …”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't.” My voice is wrecked. “Don't you dare be sorry. You had to go and get yourself first. I'd have waited twice as long.”
She laughs, wet and broken, and wipes her face. I take a second to just look at her, standing on the ice in the middle of the best night of my life, wearing her brother's jersey with his name across her shoulders.
And I can't help myself.
“Nice jersey,” I say.
She looks down at it. “I had to.”
“I know.” I brush my thumb across her cheek. “Next year, though. Next year I'd really like it if you weren't wearing your brother's name.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Is that so?” She smirks.
“Yeah.”
And then she steps back, takes hold of the hem of Emmett's jersey, and pulls the whole thing off over her head.
Underneath it, she's wearing mine. SULLIVAN is written across the back. My name is on her, and it's been on her all night, under her brother's, this whole time.
“Ember …”
“I've been wearing it since warmups,” she says. Her chin is trembling, and she's holding Emmett's jersey balled up in her fist. “I put it on at home. I nearly chickened out about a million times.”
“I …”
“Sully.” She takes a breath and looks straight at me, no wobble in it at all.
“The last time you asked me to choose, I couldn't do it. I stood there, I said nothing, and I let you walk away. I have thought about it every day since I was seventeen years old.” Her eyes are streaming.
“So, I'm standing here in front of you, in front of everyone, asking you to choose me. I totally understand if you don’t but …”
And I lose it completely as I grab her face and kiss her stupid.
Then I pick her up, right off her feet. She wraps her arms around my neck, and I hold her against me in the middle of the greatest night of my career.
I don't give a single solitary damn about the Cup, the cameras, the noise, any of it.
“I choose you,” I tell her.
THE END