Ryan
The final horn sounds and Frost Bank Center comes undone.
I stay bent over my stick for one breath. Two. Sweat drips from my chin onto the ice. My lungs burn. My shoulder throbs from getting driven into the boards in the last ninety seconds. Phoenix is finished. The first playoff berth in Stampede history belongs to San Antonio.
Around me, the boys are already gone wild.
Colt tackles Volkov in the crease. Finn throws both gloves in the air and nearly falls over one of them. Zach grabs me around the neck from behind and shouts directly into my ear.
“Playoffs, Cap.”
I let myself smile.
For a beat, I let myself want all of it: the noise, the crush of bodies in crimson and gold, the room I have helped build. This is the part nobody can package for me. No campaign. No slogan. Just twenty men who have bled for each other and earned the chance to keep going.
Phoenix’s captain grips my hand hard after the final whistle. “Hell of a game, McAllister.”
“You too.”
The moment passes. The building keeps shaking.
I skate toward the bench, but my eyes go up before I can stop them.
Section 312.
Too high. Too crowded. Too many waving towels and raised phones.
Then I see Sierra’s dark hoodie. Beside her, a baseball cap pulled low, one hand pressed to her mouth like she is trying not to smile too wide.
Peyton.
She is not hiding from me.
The knowledge hits harder than the shot block.
She has come without credentials. Without access. Without anything to take.
Our eyes should not be able to meet from that distance. The arena is too loud, the glass too bright, the bodies too many. Still, something in her posture changes. Her hand drops. Her face lifts.
My heart kicks once.
Then Colt slams into me from the side.
“Do not stand there looking tragic. We just clinched.”
I catch my balance. “I am not looking tragic.”
“You were looking like a movie poster for emotional constipation.”
“Celebrate somewhere else.”
“No.”
Colt drags me into the mob.
The locker room is chaos in the best way.
Music too loud. Champagne spraying in hard arcs.
Someone has already lost a shirt. Finn stands on a bench yelling a speech that is mostly profanity and community pride.
Evan has stolen the clinch puck and is refusing to say where he put it, which means it is probably in his equipment bag and definitely covered in something unsanitary.
Coach Sully waits until the noise crests, then whistles once.
The room quiets because Sully’s whistle can stop traffic.
“Listen up.” He is soaked from shoulder to shoe and grinning like he hates how proud he is. “You earned that. Every inch. Every blocked shot. Every hard change. Every ugly minute you played the right way when the building wanted something stupid.”
His eyes land on me for a beat.
“Enjoy tonight. Tomorrow we work. The playoffs do not care that you made history.”
The room goes up again.
I take the spray, the hugs, the shoulder hits. I give the right answers to the local cameras when they come in. Clinched a spot. Team effort. One shift at a time. The words are true enough and useless enough that nobody can cut them into trouble.
Underneath all of it, I keep seeing Section 312.
Peyton in the cheap seats.
Near midnight, after the cameras leave and the crowd in the room thins, Evan drops onto the bench beside me with two slices of cold pizza balanced on a paper plate.
“You saw her,” Evan says.
I unlace my skate. “Who?”
“Terrible. Truly. You lie like a youth pastor with a gambling app.”
“I saw her.”
Evan hands me one slice. I take it because arguing with Evan about pizza requires energy I do not have.
“Brave of her to show up,” Evan says.
“Still hate it,” Evan adds. “The article. The exposure. The part where my mother asked if I was one of the elephants.”
Despite myself, I laugh. “You told her?”
“She reads everything. Horrifying woman. Love her deeply.” Evan bites into his pizza. “But Hayes showing up without a credential? That’s not nothing.”
“No.”
“You going to do anything about it?”
“We’re in the playoffs.”
“Classic. Very masculine. Scheduling feelings around the postseason.”
I toss my towel at him.
Evan catches it one-handed and throws it back. “I’m serious.”
“That must be uncomfortable for you.”
“Deeply.” Evan’s face sobers. “Most of the boys are with you. Some of them are still pissed. Some of them don’t know what to do with the fact that the reporter they don’t trust told the truth better than we did. But they’re with you.”
I lean back against my stall.
“Silas?”
“Silas is not the room.”
An Evan answer: sharp, annoying, useful.
At home, I drop my bag by the door and stand in the dark kitchen, too wired to sleep, too exhausted to think clearly. My phone is full of messages. Zach. Colt. My father. My mother. The twins, using too many exclamation points. A team thread already degrading into insults and blurry photos.
My phone lights again before I can set it down.
Emma FaceTime.
I answer.
The screen fills with a ceiling fan.
“Move your hand,” Emma says. “He cannot see us.”
Half of Lily’s forehead slides into frame.
“I can see one eyebrow,” I say.
Lily gasps. “My good one?”
“Debatable.”
The phone jerks, and both girls appear on screen in matching playoff shirts. Emma’s is tucked in. Lily’s has a chocolate stain near the shoulder that nobody in the family is going to survive mentioning.
“You won,” Emma says.
“I heard.”
“We watched the whole game,” Lily says. “Dad yelled at the television. Mom said he was healing wrong.”
I sit at the kitchen island. “That sounds accurate.”
“Did you get the puck?” Emma asks.
“Evan stole it.”
Both girls make the same disgusted face.
“Weak leadership,” Lily says.
“Very weak,” Emma agrees.
“I will log your complaint.”
“Do you have champagne on your jersey?” Lily leans close to the camera. “Show us.”
I look down at the damp front of my shirt. “No.”
“Liar,” Emma says.
“Rude.”
“Honest,” she corrects.
I smile before I can decide against it.
For ten minutes, they talk over each other.
They show me the poster they made for game one.
They report that a neighbor honked after the final horn.
Dad tries to explain overtime to a woman at the grocery store who has not asked.
Susan refuses to let anyone carry her tea because she has hands and an opinion.
I let them talk. I ask about school. Lily has a math quiz she calls a personal attack.
Emma has finished a book and will not spoil the ending because she has standards.
They argue about who gets to wear my old sweatshirt to the arena, then decide I should send another one and solve the problem like an adult.
“I am not mailing clothes as conflict resolution.”
“Then bring it,” Emma says.
Lily nods. “And snacks.”
“You have snacks.”
“Not playoff snacks.”
I lean back and rub a hand over my face. “I do not know what that means.”
“That is why you need us,” Emma says.
The easy answer catches in my chest. I cover it by reaching for the water bottle I left on the counter.
“You looked happy,” Lily says.
I look back at the screen.
Both girls have gone still in the way children do when they have accidentally said something too adult.
“I was,” I say.
“Good,” Emma says.
“Yeah,” Lily adds. “Do that again.”
I laugh once, quiet and rough.
“I will try.”
Dad’s voice comes from somewhere behind them. “Girls, let your brother sleep.”
“He is old,” Lily calls back. “He sleeps all the time.”
“I heard that.”
“You were supposed to.”
The call ends with both girls waving too close to the camera and Emma yelling that I have to score next game because her science teacher likes Phoenix.
I lower the phone.
For a minute, the kitchen stays dark and ordinary around me. The win feels less like something I have to guard.
It feels like something I can share.
No Peyton.
I open her contact anyway.
Type: You looked happy.
That one stays longer. Long enough to hurt.
I delete it too.
My voicemail icon blinks.
Mom.
Her voice fills the kitchen, warm and tired. “Hey, sweetheart. Congratulations. Your father yelled so loudly he scared the girls. I saw Peyton on television for about one second in the stands, unless I imagined it, which I did not. She looked proud of you.”
I close my eyes.
“That girl has been carrying herself alone too long, Ryan. I am not telling you what to do. I am only saying some things need to be said while they still matter.”
The message ends.
I play it again, then call her.
She answers on the second ring. My father is loud in the background. The twins grab the phone twice. My mother asks if my shin is bruised and I lie badly enough that she laughs.
“We are coming for game one,” she says.
My body reacts before my mouth does. “Mom, you just had surgery.”
“And now I have had recovery. The doctor cleared me.”
“A playoff crowd is not normal activity.”
“Watching my son play is normal activity in this family.”
I pace to the window. “It’s a long drive. You will overdo it.”
“Your father is driving. The girls are packed already. I am not asking permission, Ryan.”
There it is. The tone I was raised on.
I press a hand to the glass and look at my reflection, hair damp, jaw tight, captain of a team that has just advanced, son of a woman who refuses to stay safely where I put her.
“I’ll send tickets,” I say.
“Good ones,” my father calls from somewhere off-phone.
I huff a laugh I do not plan. “Only the best.”