Chapter Seven
JUNIE
The first road trip of the arrangement was a three-city swing through places where hockey is a religion instead of a rumor, and I got a seat on the team bus, which Rich announced like he was granting me lands and a title and which actually meant fourteen hours of watching millionaires argue about whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
For the record: the team position, reached after forty minutes of parliamentary procedure led by Mason with a rolled-up itinerary as a gavel, was that a hot dog is “a taco of the north.” Saint, consulted as the room’s northerner, considered the question for so long the bus went quiet, and then said, “No. A taco forgives you. A hot dog has never forgiven anyone.” Eleven grown men wrote it down.
I filmed the vote for content and the clip did a million and a half by the time we crossed the state line, and the comments were all the same comment: THE TORTILLA LORE GROWS.
But that wasn’t the series. The series was the reason my content calendar had the trip circled in three colors, and I pitched it to Saint at a gas station outside of Waco while he stood by the bus in the wind eating an apple like a Bergman film.
“Saint Facts.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what it is yet.”
“I know it’s called Saint Facts. That’s most of it.”
“It’s a superstition catalogue,” I said.
“One fact per post. Fifteen seconds each. The internet already knows you tap the pipes, there’s a fan wiki, Saint, there’s a WIKI, and it’s forty percent wrong, and the wrongness keeps me up at night professionally.
We correct the record. We do it deadpan.
You confirm or deny in one sentence, I put a little chyron under you like a nature documentary.
It’s the easiest content in the world, because you, and I mean this with the whole force of my media training, are a deeply weird man with excellent bones. ”
He ate the apple. The wind did his hair, which was unfair, because the wind has never once done mine, the wind does my hair like Deacon did my career.
“Approval process,” he said finally.
“Same as everything. Nothing airs unless we both sign off. You get a veto.” I held up my phone, where the drafts lived. “Per the terms. My content, your face, joint custody.”
“One veto per fact, or one veto total?”
“Why are you like this. Per fact. Unlimited vetoes. I’m not the government.”
He looked at the apple core like it had disappointed him, which possibly it had, a fully set yolk situation, and said, “Fine,” and got back on the bus, and that was how the most successful franchise content series in league history got greenlit next to a pump that was out of premium.
We shot the catalogue over two days, in hallways and hotel gyms and once in a visiting locker room while Pickle kept watch like we were robbing it.
SAINT FACT No. 1: he taps both pipes before every period, twice, left post first. On camera I asked why left first, and he looked into the lens and said, “The left post is older,” with the finality of a man citing scripture, and refused to elaborate, and the internet lost custody of itself.
People started tapping things left-then-right in reply videos.
Doorframes. Vending machines. A woman in Ohio tapped her husband.
SAINT FACT No. 2: the oatmeal. 4:40 p.m. exactly, game days, steel-cut, cinnamon, one banana, no exceptions, and when I asked what happens at 4:41 he said, “Nothing. It’s never been 4:41,” and I had to end the take because the equipment manager walked through the frame wheezing.
SAINT FACT No. 3: he will not step on a logo on any carpet, any building, any league, and watching a six-foot-four man in a suit cross a hotel lobby like the floor was lava tested a fan theory and confirmed it, and the fan edits set it to Mission Impossible, which I could have told them, because I know my audience the way Barb knows a bad line change.
SAINT FACT No. 4: read receipts, on, since 2023. “On purpose?” I asked. “Everything I do is on purpose,” he said, which as a fact about Saint was more load-bearing than any of the others, and I saved that take twice, once for the account and once for a folder I did not examine the name of.
Facts five through nine covered the stretch order, the crease-scraping, the mask nobody touches, the stick tape (he re-tapes if anyone whistles during, no explanation, none sought), and Tuna, now formally “assistant goaltending coach” per a graphic I made that the team adopted with terrifying speed.
Engagement went vertical. The league account shared Fact No.
1. A morning show asked for an interview and Saint said no in one word and I turned the no into a post and THAT did numbers.
We had reached the stage of the internet where his refusals outperformed other teams’ cooperation.
And then there was the fact I never numbered.
I’d had it in the drafts from the beginning, because I’d seen it my first month on the job, from the tunnel, before I had any idea what I was seeing: Saint, during warmups, alone in his crease, leaning in close to each post in turn and talking to it.
Quietly. In Swedish. Ten, fifteen seconds a post, like a word with each of them before work, and then he straightens up and he’s a wall for sixty minutes.
Gus had confirmed the language, because Gus has ears like a barn owl and no sense that anything is private.
It was, from a content standpoint, the crown jewel.
Grumpy goalie whispers to his goalposts in his grandmother’s language.
It would have been the biggest post in franchise history.
I had the caption drafted. I’d had it drafted for a week.
I showed him the draft in a hotel conference room in between cities, laptop turned around on the table the way he’d once turned mine around in a diner, and he read it, and something happened to his face that I had no chyron for.
It wasn’t anger. I’d seen his anger, it comes with a jaw. This was somebody stepping in front of something. He looked at the draft the way I imagine he sees a two-on-one, everything slowing down, the whole body organizing around what has to be protected.
“No,” he said. “Veto.”
“Okay,” I said. And then, because I am me, “Can I ask…”
“No.”
“…why. Right. You can’t or you won’t?”
He slid the laptop back across the table. “Fact ten doesn’t air. That’s the whole sentence.”
And here’s the thing, the thing I keep turning over: he’d given me everything else.
The oatmeal, which he’d guarded from his own teammates for two years.
The pipes. The carpet logos, which genuinely made him look insane in a way athletes’ teams usually pay me to prevent.
He’d sat for two days of me pointing a phone at his rituals and narrating him like a wildlife special, and he’d been, in his sideways way, generous about it, funny about it, he’d LET ME IN, professionally speaking, further than any athlete I’d ever covered. One fact. He took back exactly one.
“Vetoed,” I said, and deleted the draft while he watched, one letter at a time, the way I delete things that matter, and I saw him see that, and neither of us said anything about either thing.
Fact ten stayed ours. Mine and his and the posts’.
The series ran through the trip, one fact a day, and by the last city the visiting arenas had turned on us in the best way: opposing fans tapping the glass behind his net, left then right, before puck drop.
Not mocking it. Doing it. Hockey people are pagans at heart, and Saint stood in his crease in a building that hated us and watched strangers perform his grandfather’s arithmetic on the glass, and he tapped his pipes back, and I got it in slow motion, and I cried a little in the press box, which I logged as allergies, which nobody believed, because Mason saw and told the committee.
Mason: sunshine is crying in the press box Junie: it’s DUST, this arena was built during the truman administration Pickle: fact 11: saint’s fake girlfriend cries at glass taps Saint: vetoed.
Vetoed. One word, the fourth voice in the thread, and the committee went respectfully feral about it for two hundred messages, and I sat there in the Truman-era press box looking at that single word doing exactly what his taped hands had done in January, arriving quietly and standing in front of me, and I put my phone face down on the counter like it was hot.
The last night of the trip I lay in my hotel room, in a city where it was nine degrees outside and my Texas coat was a joke everyone had already made, and I did not sleep, and I would like to pretend it was the pillow.
Here’s what I knew, cataloguer that I am.
I knew his oatmeal minute and his stretch order and the age hierarchy of his goalposts.
I knew he’d surrendered all of it to me, on camera, for the team, for the numbers, for Hartford’s tombstone, cheerfully as he does anything, which is to say like a man paying a toll.
Nine facts. The whole visible ritual, itemized, published, mine.
And I knew that somewhere under the catalogue was a fact he’d stepped in front of with his whole body, and that whatever a man says quietly in Swedish to two metal posts before every game, he had decided the entire internet could have his oatmeal before one other living soul got that.
I lay awake doing inventory in the dark. What does a man keep back, when he’s given up the oatmeal? What’s behind the veto, when nothing else got one?
I fell asleep without an answer, and the last thing I thought, drifting, in the honest voice you only get at the very edge of sleep, was that I wanted to know it not for the account, not for the numbers, not for any calendar, and that this, per a load-bearing rule in a shared document, was exactly the problem.