Chapter Twelve
SAINT
We won in Denver. Then we won at home against Minnesota, which cost me forty texts from Duluth, and then we won three more, and by the second week of March the Austin Chupacabras, an expansion team whose own general manager had spent October pricing moving trucks, had the longest active winning streak in the league.
Streaks are a problem for a superstitious profession.
You can’t talk about them, obviously. Nobody in the room said the word.
Pickle got physically escorted away from a reporter who tried to make him say it.
But you also can’t stop doing anything you were doing when the streak started, that’s the first law, and this is where my March went wrong, because when I audited what I was doing when the streak started, the honest inventory had a new line item in it, and the line item had a ring light.
The league’s analytics blog found it before I did.
They ran a piece with a headline I had read to me four separate times by four separate teammates, each of whom enjoyed it more than the last: “THE SUNSHINE EFFECT? Lindell’s save percentage, home attendance, and one very good social media account.
” There were charts. There was a scatter plot of my goals-against average with a vertical line marked, and I am quoting a league publication, “first taco video.” Everything after the line was better than everything before the line.
Save percentage up. High-danger saves up.
Attendance up thirty-one percent. The piece was careful to note, in the responsible-journalism paragraph, that correlation is not causation, and then it ran a photo of the kiss cam anyway, because the blog also has engagement targets.
I read the piece at 4:15 p.m. on a game day, which was a mistake, because at 4:40 the oatmeal happened, and for the first time in my adult life I watched myself make it.
Steel-cut, cinnamon, one banana, Olle’s shift meal, timed to a dead man’s lunch whistle, and while it cooked I caught myself doing the thing I had apparently been doing for weeks without filing it: I checked the hallway outside the players’ lounge, because at 4:40 Junie came down that hallway with her second coffee, on her way to yell at the arena wifi, and if I timed the oatmeal right I could be at the counter when she passed the door, and she would look in and say something unacceptable about my banana, and that, the audit revealed, had become part of it.
Part of the ritual. Olle’s ritual. The one with the load on it.
I ate the oatmeal standing up and had what I can only describe as a very Swedish crisis, which from the outside looks like a man eating oatmeal.
Let me lay out the full inspection report, because I did the whole walk-through that afternoon, checked every weld.
The stretches: intact, hips before groin, the hinges of the door.
The logo rule: intact. The pipe taps: intact, left then right, respect your elders.
The posts: intact, still spoken to, still in Swedish.
But the sequence had grown. Somewhere in the last two months, without a permit, without so much as a change order, the sequence had become: oatmeal at 4:40, hallway, her coffee, the banana comment, stretches, tape, taps, talk to the posts, and then, new, load-bearing, non-optional, find her laugh in the tunnel.
She was always in the tunnel before warmups, filming the walk-out.
And somewhere in the tunnel, every night, somebody said something to her, Gus, a trainer, a nine-year-old in a SUNSHINE jersey, and she laughed, and the laugh came down that concrete like weather, and I had begun, I found, to wait for it.
Not enjoy it. Wait for it. Locate it before I took the ice the way I located my posts, and one night in late February when she’d been delayed by a sponsor call and the tunnel stayed quiet, I had stood in the crease through the entire anthem feeling like a man who’d forgotten to lock something.
We won that night anyway. That’s what scared me.
Here’s the arithmetic, the half I never told her at the diner.
The rituals are Olle’s machinery. As long as they run, some of him runs.
I had kept that machine sealed for two years, museum condition, every part original.
And now there was an aftermarket component in it, a person, bolted straight into the drivetrain between the posts and the anthem, and the machine ran BETTER, that was the crisis, the numbers said so, the blog had charts, and I stood there with my oatmeal understanding that I had rewired my grandfather’s inheritance around a woman I was contractually obligated to not have feelings for, per rule 7, load-bearing, her clause, and the whole renovation had been performed live, with the power on, by a licensed electrician named nobody.
Olle had opinions about unlicensed work. Olle once drove four hours to re-do a cousin’s deck railing on principle.
I did what I do with things I can’t stop with my body.
I went to the rink early and told the left post about it.
In Swedish, quietly, gear half on, empty building, Tuna supervising from the top of the net like a line judge.
I laid out the facts. The oatmeal timing.
The tunnel. The blog. The scatter plot. The hand over the pillow wall in Denver, which I had not mentioned to anyone, which I had thought about at 4:40 and 11:52 and several unscheduled times daily since.
The post said what it always says, which is nothing, which is how it says everything, and Tuna bit my glove, which I chose not to interpret.
The room found out about the crisis the way the room finds out about everything, which is Mason.
Mason Duffy has captained this team for two seasons with a shoulder he thinks nobody knows about and a group chat he wields like a power play.
He’d watched me in the tunnel. He’s a golden retriever, people forget retrievers were bred to notice where things fall.
And on the fifth night of the streak, after another win, my phone did its ceremony on the bench of my stall, and I opened the chat called Saint’s Wedding Planning Committee, membership me, Mason, Pickle, Noa, and Junie, a chat I had attempted to leave nine times and been re-added ten.
Junie, for once, was not in the building. Sponsor dinner. Mason had checked. That’s the part I want noted: he checked, and then he sent it, so it would be on the record and she would never see it, because under the nonsense Mason runs the room like a man who reads it.
Mason: committee business. saint. if you hurt her we riot Pickle: riot Noa: I’ll tape your riots Saint: it’s fake Mason: sure. so is my shoulder
I sat at my stall in a winning locker room, in a building that had been half empty in October and was sold out through March, holding a phone with read receipts on since 2023, so all three of them knew I’d seen it, and all three of them watched me type nothing for four minutes.
Because here’s what I had, in order, in front of the net:
It’s fake was the truth. There was a document.
There were terms. There was a rule with her name on the clause, no real feelings, load-bearing, and I had co-signed it at a diner with conditions of my own, and every public thing we had done since January was per that document, scheduled, starred, eight seconds max.
And it’s fake was also the biggest lie I had told since I stood at a funeral and told my mother I was fine to drive.
The oatmeal knew. The tunnel knew. The left post had been briefed in full.
Mason’s shoulder, that traitor organ, had been quietly wrong all season, taped before every game by a doctor who insulted him while she did it, and Mason played through it and smiled through it and called it fine in every scrum, and when he typed so is my shoulder he was telling me, in the only language the room speaks, that he knew exactly what playing through something looked like, because he did it every night, and he was watching me do it, and he was not fooled, and neither was the tape.
Pickle, twenty-two years old, mustache like a rumor, added a fist emoji and then, thirty seconds later, unsent it, which I believe cost him something.
I put the phone in my bag. I undid my pads in the usual order, because the order is the order. And I performed the last audit of the night, the one I’d been putting off, the one with Olle in it, and I’ll enter it here because it goes somewhere and I don’t say it out loud for a long time:
The machine was his. Every part. And the man who built that machine built nothing in his life that was meant to stay sealed.
The net was for pucks. The boards were for winters.
The low switch on the floodlight was so a kid could reach it, so the rink would get USED, that was the whole engineering philosophy of Olle Lindell, things exist to bear load, and a ritual that couldn’t take one more person bolted onto it wasn’t a machine, it was a museum, and he had despised museums, he said they were garages that gave up.
That thought arrived whole, unscheduled, in his voice, while I hung my chest protector on its hook, and I stood there and let it run, and it felt less like a crisis and more like an inspection passed, and that frightened me worse than the blog.
Streak at six. Oatmeal at 4:40. Taps, left then right. Her laugh in the tunnel, located, filed, load-bearing.
I re-opened the chat and replied to the committee, one line, because if it was going to be on the record it should at least be accurate:
Saint: the riot won’t be necessary
Mason liked it in four seconds, which from Mason is a notarized document, and Pickle replied “wait so is it fake or” and was removed from the chat by the chairman, temporarily, for asking the one question nobody in the organization, including me, either post, the cat, or a league analytics blog with a scatter plot, had been able to answer since January.