Chapter 31 Soucy
“It’s a Sunday,” Lundy says, from the stool, the braced leg out straight. “Sundays don’t have a theme.”
“Everything has a theme if you look hard enough.”
“That’s the least true thing you’ve ever said. Seven across is ‘keystone.’”
“You didn’t even let me try.”
“It’s Game 7. I’m not letting anything take forty-five seconds today.”
He sets the pen down. He looks at me for a while, and I let him, because I know what is coming. There is no version of the day where he does not say it.
“I can’t do anything for you out there tonight,” he says.
“I know.”
“I’m going to sit on that stool and watch my own father try to take this from you and I won’t be able to lift a finger.”
“You being unable to help isn’t the same as you being no help. You taught me that.”
“...yeah.”
“Sit on your stool. Watch. That was always enough. It’s still enough.”
Thompson sets the coffee by my left hand, far from the edge.
“Forty-five?”
“Forty-five.”
“On Game 7.”
“The game doesn’t get a vote on the number.”
“That’s the most Soucy thing you’ve ever said. Go.”
Bodie crouches at the edge of the six feet and doesn’t come into it. “You earned the right to be standing here. Most guys play years and never see a Game 7. You get one in your first pro-season. Go have fun with it.”
“Fun.” There is definite scepticism in my voice.
“Fun. That’s an order, not a suggestion.”
The building is the loudest I’ve ever heard a building be. The puck drops on the last game of the season.
They come at me from the first shift as they have come all series.
Karl does not change what works, he sharpens it.
Three at the top of the crease. Traffic in my eyes.
The same machine that buried me in Game 4, except I am not the same goalie who stood in net for Game 4.
I know its shapes now the way I know the back of the paper Lundy folds into the bench.
The point shot through the screen. The cross-seam that wants me to reset twice.
The first time they run the screen play I am already at the post the trickle goes to, and the puck dies in my pad.
They score first anyway. Good teams do. A tip off a point shot that changes direction twice and I get a piece of nothing. The building goes from a roar to a held breath, and I do not let the held breath into the crease. The crease is the one room the noise has to wait outside of.
We take a penalty four minutes later. A tired stick on a backcheck.
For two minutes the whole season is a five-on-four with Karl running the power play he’s had a week to sharpen against me.
The bumper drops to the dot early and the seam pass comes whether the lane is open or not.
I’ve watched this power play four hundred times and I’ve stood inside my own net against it for six games.
I know it now the way I know the order my pads go on.
The one-timer from the top I take in the chest. The backdoor tap they want, I’m already at the post for.
The winger curled instead of drove. The curl has always been the tell.
The kill dies on my pad, and the building lets its breath back out.
We answer in the second. Marchetti, of course it is Marchetti, off a tired backcheck at the twelve-minute mark, exactly the way a man on a stool said it would come. The building exhales and roars at once. We are level. The game stops being a funeral.
Then it becomes the other thing. The thing Game 7s become, where the lead is a coat nobody gets to keep.
They take it back four minutes after Marchetti ties it.
A wrist shot from the slot that finds the one lane a screen leaves open.
I do not see it leave the stick. You cannot stop what you cannot see.
Two to one. The building sits down. Then Berger walks one in off the rush and roofs it on their goalie’s glove side.
We are level again. Two-two. Their best player gets a step on our D and comes in alone.
I do the thing I do, which is nothing. No lunge.
No dive. I am already where he is going.
I take the puck off his stick. The building screams like we scored, because a save can be a goal in a game like this.
They hit a post. We hit a post. The horn for the second intermission goes with the whole thing knotted two-two.
I skate off and the noise follows me down the tunnel. I do not let it in.
Berger finds me in the room, eyes too wide. “It’s just a hockey game now.”
“It was always a just hockey game.”
“Yeah, but now it feels like one. First period it felt like a funeral and a wedding at the same time and I couldn’t tell which.”
Lundy is there too, off the stool, balanced on the crutches. He comes the slow distance to my stall and does not say anything about the score.
“You’re square. You’re seeing it. Keep doing exactly what you’re doing.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m saying it out loud so it’s said.”
“Keep saying it. It lands different when you say it.”
He stays. That is the whole of it. He stands on the crutches with his weight on the good leg and he stays, not coaching now, not solving, just there as the boards are there and the glass is there.
I used to read that kind of staying as someone waiting for permission to fix me. I do not read it that way anymore.
The third period is sixty thousand years long and fourteen seconds at the same time.
It is the Cup on every shift. How they told me it would be when I was a kid who would never get here.
The puck in my net a tip away and in their net a bounce away.
Both of those things sometimes true inside the same thirty seconds.
I rob their winger on a one-timer that was a goal.
That was already a goal in the building’s throat.
The puck is in my glove instead. I do not know how.
The hand knew before I did. The hand has always known before I did.
Down the other end we hit a post, and the sound of a post in a tied Game 7 is a sound I will hear when I am old.
The lead does not change hands because there is no lead.
There is just the even line and the clock eating itself and the building on its feet for the last ten minutes straight.
And across the ice, the whole time, my partner’s father.
Arms folded. Face doing nothing. Designing every puck that comes at me, sending his best out against my tendencies, attacking the goalie he scouted on a phone call the night his son’s leg was still under him.
He is not cruel. He is the best there is.
And tonight the best there is cannot find the six inches.
The goalie he is hunting is not playing scared.
He is not playing small. He is playing to win the only game that has ever been this simple, with all of himself, taking up every inch of the net he is finally willing to believe is his.
With nine minutes left they get a scramble in my crease.
Three whacks at a loose puck. A stick under my pad and a body across my back.
I find it with my blocker hand flat on the ice and pin it.
The whistle goes. I will not be able to explain this to anyone afterward.
The building makes the sound a building makes when it has aged a full year in four seconds.
Down the other end their goalie robs Marchetti on a chance that should have ended the season, the glove coming out of a place gloves do not come out of.
Marchetti puts his head back and screams at the rafters, and from two hundred feet away I understand him completely.
The clock is the enemy now, not their team.
It will not move. Every time I look up it has eaten a few seconds and left all the rest. So I stop looking up.
Six minutes left, we score.
M?kinen, of all people. A slapper from the point through a screen of our own making, and the red light goes and the building comes apart.
We are up one. One goal. The first lead anyone has held in twenty minutes, six minutes between this franchise and the thing it was built to chase.
I do not celebrate it. The lead is just a number and numbers move.
I have four rounds of evidence that they move.
They pull their goalie again with two minutes left.
Six skaters crowding my end of the ice. It is Game 4 all over again.
The forest. The bodies. The puck a rumor.
Except it is not Game 4. I am not drowning.
I am standing in the exact place the geometry says to stand.
The geometry has never once lied to me. They throw everything.
A point shot I catch clean and hold until the whistle.
A frozen puck is six more seconds off the clock.
Six seconds is a currency now. The faceoff comes back in.
A scramble I smother. A one-timer from the dot that I take off the shoulder.
It caroms high. A whole section of the building stands up thinking it is in.
It is not in. It is in the netting. They sit back down with their hands on their heads.
A cross-ice pass that I get across for, post to post. The way Lundy goes post to post. The way I watched him do it a thousand times on film before I ever knew I was studying the man and not the save.
Tabarnak, the clock. The clock will not move.
I cover the puck. The whistle goes. Forty seconds left.
A faceoff to my right, in my end. Their six against our five.
The season standing on a draw in the circle.
I get set on my post. I find the puck in the linesman’s hand.
The building is one sound now. One long held note.
I am the smallest part of the loudest thing in the world.
I have never in my life felt bigger. The linesman drops the puck.
?