1. Ryan #2
He held my gaze and sized me up, steady and in no rush, the same read I imagined he’d run on a lot of hockey players. “I know what they told you when they brought you here.” Not a question.
“They did.”
“That’s their want. This is mine.” He met my eyes. “You’ve got the C. Don’t make me regret it.”
I nodded. Resting my hands on my knees to keep still, the captaincy had just become real in a way it hadn’t been until this moment.
He pushed off the wall. “One more thing.”
I waited.
“This city lost a team. The Coyotes were here for twenty-eight years and then they were gone and it still stings. People here didn’t just lose hockey—they got burned, and burned people don’t trust easy.
” He paused and took me in for a minute; I thought trying to turn this conversation into more of a pep talk.
“They’re not going to love us because we showed up and have good branding.
We have to earn it. You understand what that means in terms of how this team carries itself, on the ice, off it, in this community. ”
“Yeah,” I said. “I understand.”
Calloway nodded and went back through the door. I stood in the hallway for a moment under the fluorescent lights, the locker room noise muffled behind me and the hum of the AC working hard against the August heat outside.
Sawyer Shaw came out of the coaches’ wing a few minutes later, tablet in hand.
Forty-two, former goalie. A knee ended it early.
I knew the file. In person Shaw still moved like an athlete, no wasted motion, every step economical, as if his body had never gotten the memo that his career was over.
He had no time for anything that didn’t matter.
He stopped when he saw me.
“Good first practice,” he said. Not a compliment. An assessment.
“First of a lot of them,” I said.
Shaw nodded once, a nod that meant he’d noted it and moved on.
“My door’s open if you need anything. I mean that literally, not the press conference version.
” He paused, something direct settling in his expression.
“You’re the reason this franchise exists in the form it does.
That’s not a small thing. Don’t carry it alone. ”
He kept walking. I watched him go and stored that one too.
I thought about the contract. What it meant if Calloway gave me that C. Sawyer Shaw across the conference table saying we’re building around you.
I thought about what Griffin had said. You’ve always been the guy.
I rolled my neck until something cracked.
V?lkommen hem, I thought. Welcome home.
I went back inside.
The parking lot at three in the afternoon was its own punishment. I got in my truck, cranked the AC, and sat there while the air went from hostile to merely warm, watching heat shimmer off the asphalt in the middle distance.
My phone buzzed.
Griffin: Rusty Nail 7pm, it’s tradition if we do it twice
Ryan: We’ve been here four days
Griffin: Tradition has to start somewhere
I pulled out of the lot and onto the sun-bleached road, the desert flat and blue-skied in every direction and let myself feel the thing I’d been keeping at a professional distance all day.
I was unreservedly excited about this. The group in that locker room.
Calloway in the hallway. The rattlesnake on center ice staring out like it knew the future.
The city full of people who’d been burned once and were deciding whether to try again.
I turned the radio on. Country station. Not my thing, and probably not going to become my thing, but I had a whole desert to get used to.
I had become eager for it.
Training camp closed in around us until nothing outside of it existed.
The intensity a group of people locked into the same obsessive project would have, measuring themselves against each other and against some imagined standard, learning the language of a new team through repetition and competition and the occasional stupid locker room argument about nothing.
I’d been through camp before. I’d never been through one like this.
The difference was the stakes. Everyone in that building knew what this was.
Not just another season, not another year of plugging into a system someone else had built.
This was foundational. The decisions made in these weeks would shape what the Sidewinders became, maybe for a decade.
The weight of it hit me every morning and every night, and I’d stopped pretending otherwise because carrying it honestly cost less than the pretending did.
Griffin helped. Griffin helped a lot, the way he always had, showing up at my apartment with takeout when I was too deep in film to remember to eat, talking through line combinations and system adjustments with the same ease we’d talked through exams in our dorm room at Minnesota State a decade ago.
He introduced me to his parents. Sunday dinner at the Callahan house in Scottsdale, Tom and Linda, who absorbed me into their Sunday routine like I’d always been part of it.
Linda put food in front of me before I’d sat down.
Tom asked me questions about hockey and was satisfied with the answers.
Griffin’s had a sister, and I’d met her.
Maren. She’d visited Griffin his senior year, a weekend in February, cold enough that she’d been bundled up the entire time and still complained she couldn’t feel her hands.
I remembered her precisely. Dark hair, quick laugh, and something self-contained and easy about her I’d never forgotten.
She’d pulled my sister’s moose hat on without checking a mirror, tugged it down over her ears, and said thank you like it was important.
I remembered other things too, things I’d made a decision about at the time and had been remaking ever since.
She’d been Griffin’s sister. I’d had other things to focus on.
When Audrey sent the Phoenix staff roster three weeks ago I’d seen Maren Callahan’s name and read it twice before I kept going. I’d told myself that was nine years ago. I’d told myself it didn’t matter.
I’d held a line that weekend. It was the right call then and I’d moved on.