Chapter 1 Soucy
The Tampa facility is designed for teams that lose when they play here.
Low ceiling. Stalls crammed a foot too close.
A support column in the corner that the home club would never tolerate in its own room.
My stall is third from the column, so the geometry is wrong before I unzip the bag.
I stand in front of it, doing the math of a space designed to make me uncomfortable, and it’s succeeding.
Lundy is two stalls down with the crossword folded into eighths, because the crossword travels with us too.
“Eleven across,” he says.
“I don’t have the paper.”
“‘Florida coastal city.’” His pen hovers over the paper. “Eight letters.”
“Sarasota.”
“Could be Key West.”
“Key West is two words and eight letters only if the puzzle counts the space, which it won’t, so it’s Sarasota, and you knew that, and you’re stalling because you don’t want to start the hard part of the page.”
“I’m pacing myself.” He looks up at me and grins.
“It’s a Tuesday.”
“Tuesdays are honest. Low stakes.” He writes it in. “Not everything has to be a Saturday.”
“Some of us like a puzzle that fights back.”
“Some of us don’t need the fight.” The pen moves. He starts tonight; I back him up. This is the arrangement. The arrangement is right. He fills in a Florida coastal city while my hands run the pattern against my thigh without being asked. Thumb to each finger and back.
The room is wrong. I feel it, but can’t tell if it’s the ceiling height, the energy the team has making it to the playoffs, or just a different space than my mind wants to be in.
The room is less wrong with him two stalls down though.
I do not look at why. There is nothing to look at.
He is there. The count holds. The gear goes on in the order it goes on.
“Anybody needs outside this room, now is your chance,” Davis says from the doorway.
“I’m not moving for the next forty-five.
” He’s appointed himself the door, same as every building.
Shoulder to the frame, so the Tampa staff and their cameras stop being a problem before they become one.
He’s decided his job tonight, before any of the actual job, is to be a wall between the hallway and my count.
Nobody asked him to. Same as the equipment kid turning my bag and bringing juice across a state line because it’s the only thing he doesn’t have to think about.
I notice who moved. I notice what it cost them. I always notice.
Nobody asks me to keep that math. I keep it anyway. Quietly. The way I keep everything.
“You see the panel they ran before the flight?” Marchetti drops onto the bench across the aisle, all knees and motion. “Guy said we were the easiest out left in the field. Said it with his whole chest. Easiest out.”
“We are the easiest out,” Berger says. “On paper. We’re a seven-one seed in a field where everyone else is an eight-six.”
“That’s not a real number.”
“It’s more real than their power play, and I’ll be proven correct.”
“What’s our power play in your fake numbers, then.”
“Nine-two. We’re a nine-two power play the panel refuses to chart because it offends them.”
“We’re twentieth in the league on the power play, Berger.”
“The league doesn’t know what it’s looking at either.” He says it to the ceiling.
“He’s not wrong, though,” Thompson says, lacing up. “On paper. Nobody outside this room thinks we win even one game in this series.”
The flat thing is in my mouth before I weigh it. “He’s right. On paper we’re the easiest out. We should send him a fruit basket for managing our expectations.”
Thompson laughs into his own shoulder. Marchetti points at me like I’ve confessed to a crime.
Berger opens his mouth to assign the fruit basket a score, then closes it, because two stalls down Lundy’s pen has stopped and the corner of his mouth has gone up.
That’s more interesting to Berger than fruit.
Lundy doesn’t look up. He heard it. He always hears it.
I go back to the right cuff and let the room close over the quiet I keep in it.
“Walk me through their looks,” Lundy says when the noise drifts off down the room. The pen is down now. He’s looking at the crossword and but not really.
This one matters, so I find the words for it.
“Their second power play runs everything through the left-shot D-man at the point. He’s not a shooter, he’s a passer pretending to be a shooter, which is worse, because the whole unit is built on you believing the shot.
He winds up, you drop, the puck’s already gone low to the bumper.
Eleven power plays in the three games I watched.
He faked the one-timer nine times and shot it twice.
Clean zone time, it’s a pass. Scramble, then he shoots. ”
“So I read the entry, not the windup.”
“You read the entry. Give him the point shot, because it isn’t coming. Their first unit’s the reverse. First unit you respect everything. Number seventeen is a real shot off the top of the circle, and he beats you clean if you cheat the pass even once.”
“They forecheck?”
“Hard. First man’s on our defense before the puck settles. So don’t expect clean breakouts in front of you. Expect us rushed, expect the puck coming back at you off a turnover.”
“So we make the first man wrong.”
“We make the first man wrong, or we eat it on the wall all night. Either way it’s our skaters’ problem before it’s yours. By the time it reaches you it’s a scramble, and you already know what they do in a scramble.”
“Twenty-two shoots.”
“Now you’ve got it.” I peel another length of tape.
“Nine though, he lives in your blue paint, doesn’t tip much, screens, and he’s big enough that Davis isn’t moving him off the spot.
You’re finding your looks around a body all night.
Fight for sightline when it’s worth it, let the rest go. You see it late, you see it late.”
“What about their goalie? Give me something to hate.”
“He’s good high, cheats his glove early. Our shooters want it low blocker, far pad. That’s their problem, though. Yours is nine in your paint and twenty-two working Gertie’s side every shift.” I set the roll down beside the pad, where it goes. “So tell her. She should know it’s coming.”
“You want me to brief the goalpost on Tampa’s power play?”
“She likes to be prepared.”
The corner of his mouth goes the whole way. “I’ll let her know.” He fills a word in, then looks up. The look is steadier than the joke was. “Three games of their second unit, Souce. We barely see their second unit half the night.”
“I watched three games of everything.”
“Of course you did.” He says it warm, no edge to it.
He’s called the left post Gertie and the right one Quessa since the second week of camp.
I gave him the names and he never once asked me what I meant by it.
Most things about me arrive in front of people as a problem to solve.
He took two names and put them in his mouth like they were the most obvious things in the room.
Warmups are warmups. The ice cuts different under visiting blades.
Southern buildings keep the sheet soft, and the edges come a half-second late until my legs find it.
Two loops in a building that boos us. A third loop at three-quarter because the hamstring asked.
Shots from the second unit then we come off the ice.
Finally, we are back out for the anthem and the puck drop. The barn comes down on us like weather, thousands of people who would like us gone in four short games. I’m at the end of the away bench where I belong, mask by my side, watching the only thing on this ice worth my full attention.
Lundy. I’ve studied Lundy for four years, on game replays for a few years and from a bench for another, before this team even had a logo.
There’s a thing he does that almost nobody clocks, because it isn’t a save.
It’s the absence of needing one. He’s already where the puck is going, depth set before the shooter finishes choosing.
The shot arrives and finds him there. It looks boring.
Boring is the hardest work a goalie does.
This is film study. This is my job. I do it from the end of the bench with my gloves off and my hands flat on the pads while the building wills the puck past him.
Their twenty-two carries it on his off wing in the second. Cuts to the middle exactly as the tape said. Lundy is already deep, already square. The puck meets his glove and dies in the corner. The barn groans, that specific home-rink sound of a crowd that expected a goal and got my goalie instead.
My hands have stopped.
I notice it the way I noticed the bag. Thumb to each finger and back.
They were running the pattern and now they’re still on the pads and the count is nowhere.
I didn’t tell them to quit. The read was right.
The save was clean. The puck is in the corner.
Somewhere in the middle of that, the pattern let go of me.
I shelve it. Good positioning, good glove, the save you build a series on.
The hands can do what they want. There’s nothing in the stopping that asks for a name.
Lundy taps both posts, glove then blocker, Gertie then Quessa.
Resets his depth. The play comes back the other way.
I keep track of him. Nobody on this bench knows how much I keep track of.
Down the bench Marchetti is screaming at officials who can’t hear him over their own crowd.
Davis is hammering the boards. The noise wants us dead.
I sit at the end where no elbow finds me, and I watch my goalie hold his net in a building that paid to see him fail.
After a while, the count finds my fingers again on its own.
Slow and even. The idle hum of a brain with nowhere it needs to be tonight except here, doing this, for as long as they let me stay.