Chapter Twenty-Six
SAINT
The playoffs, for the record, since somebody in this story has to keep the hockey honest while everyone else is busy being in love.
The second round is shorter to tell. We lost in five.
I want to be precise about it, because the internet was not.
We did not collapse. We lost four one-goal games to the best team in the conference, a machine that had been assembled on purpose over nine drafts, and we stole game three from them at home just to be rude.
Junie clipped forty seconds of Barb’s speech after game five for the season documentary, with Barb’s permission, which Barb granted by saying “fine” and blowing a bubble, and the forty seconds are the truest scouting report anyone filed on us all year: “You took the best team in this league to the wall in a state where the ice is a rumor. Anybody in this room who is embarrassed can see me in my office, where I will not be, because I’m going to Marge’s. ”
Here is the thing nobody tells you about losing in the second round. Sometimes it lands soft.
It landed soft because of the building. Moontower Arena sold out every playoff date, all six home games, upper bowl to the rafters, and by the last one the fire marshal and Rich had developed a relationship I would describe as professionally tense.
Section 118 did the chant in the third period of game five even after it was over, down two with a minute left, SUN-SHINE, SUN-SHINE, sixteen thousand people saluting a woman in a booth instead of mourning a scoreboard, and the kid in the SUNSHINE 00 jersey was on the glass with the hubcap sunglasses on, and Marcus put him on the board, and the kid pointed at the booth, and the booth, I am told, wept into a ring light.
And it landed soft because of the spreadsheet.
The league’s viability review closed April 30.
The report leaked in May, because everything leaks, we are a franchise held together by leaks, and the relevant table said what the barn had been saying out loud since February.
Attendance: target exceeded. Engagement: target exceeded by a number with a footnote, because the auditors had to explain that one clip of a man reading a shared document at a podium had outperformed the league’s own championship content.
Relocation assessment: no action recommended.
Somewhere in Connecticut, a city that never asked for us went on with its life.
Junie printed the table and taped it inside the booth, under Beyoncé the Second, like a fish you mount.
Rich cried at the leak. Rich cried at the fire marshal. It was a big spring for Rich.
And it landed soft because of the family box.
Rich gave us a box for the home playoff dates, families of players and staff, and by game two of the second round it had an ecosystem.
My mother flew in from Duluth and formed an alliance with Hazel that frightens me at a structural level.
Junie’s mother came up from Waco and taught my mother the queso protocol.
Gus let Tuna up there exactly once, and Tuna sat in the taco bed on the counter overlooking center ice like a small orange commissioner, and Gus took her back down after one period, saying she picks people who need supervising and the box was oversupervised already.
And Theo held court.
My brother watched the games I played in that box with his floor’s whole cheering section of two, our mother and a rotating guest, and between periods he did what Theo does, which is acquire subjects. By the second round he was teaching Pickle to trash-talk in ASL.
I have to describe this because it is now league history.
Pickle, scratched for game four with a hip thing, spent two full intermissions in the box getting coached, and Theo is a rigorous teacher and a sixteen-year-old, so the curriculum was weighted toward material a rigorous sixteen-year-old finds funny.
In game five, second period, their winger, a large unpleasant man who had been running our crease all series, skated past our bench, and Pickle stood up and delivered, in enormous, careful, terrible ASL, a full sentence.
The winger did not understand it. That was never the point.
The point was the family box, where my brother stood up and returned it, and the two of them signed at each other across two hundred feet of arena like ship flags, and the broadcast caught it, and Deaf hockey internet adopted Pickle within the hour, and when I asked Theo afterward what the sentence was, he looked at me with our grandfather’s exact face and signed, private conversation.
I asked Pickle. Pickle went red under the mustache and said, “It’s between me and the kid,” and I want it noted that the rookie kept the secret all summer, which is more than this franchise’s plumbing has ever done.
That was the season. Handshake line on a Friday night in another city, Barb tapping every helmet twice on the way past, which she thinks nobody has noticed, and then the plane home, and then the locker cleanout, and then the strange sudden quiet of April becoming May, when a hockey player turns back into a man who owns too many identical black suitcases.
I did the quiet well, for once. Historically I have done offseason like a decommissioned submarine.
This year there was a woman with a content calendar and a sister and a wind chime, and there was Theo’s end-of-term project, and there was a cat who now split custody between the rink and Junie’s fruit bowl with the shameless diplomacy of a small nation.
I read three naval-disaster paperbacks on Junie’s balcony.
She filmed my reading face once, thirty seconds of a man frowning at the Lusitania, and it got two million views, and I have elected not to understand that.
Then June came, and with it the letter.
It came the modern way, which is to say my agent called four times in one hour, and then it came the old way too, a courier envelope, heavy paper, a logo I had grown up praying to.
An NHL club. A real one, an Original Six one, the kind of organization that does not have to try.
Their starter had aged out in the spring.
They had watched the playoffs. They had watched, specifically, per the letter, “the best positional goaltending in professional hockey played outside the NHL,” and they were offering a two-year contract at a number that made my agent produce a sound I had never heard from him, a kind of reverent whinny.
I was at Junie’s counter when I opened it. She was making migas, her order, the exact one, and Tuna was in the fruit bowl impersonating produce, and I read the letter once at normal speed and then once more slowly, the way you rewatch a goal against.
This was the thing, and I want it in the record straight.
It was everything. Not a version of everything.
The actual item. Nine years old on Olle’s backyard rink, breath in a scarf, and my grandfather points at the radio doing a Wild game and says in Swedish, one day that noise says your name, and I had carried that sentence through every bus league and every taco-based franchise since.
The letter in my hand was that noise, saying my name.
Junie turned around with the pan and read my face, which is a skill she has that I have stopped being unsettled by, and she turned the burner off, which told me my face was worse than I thought.
I handed it to her. She read it. She put it down on the counter, flat, and smoothed the crease out of it, which is my gesture, she has stolen my gestures, and she looked up with her whole open face and said the thing that only she would say first.
“Congratulations, Lars.”
Not what about us. Not what about the team.
Congratulations, first, because the nine-year-old with the scarf was real to her too, I had introduced them months ago in the dark.
Then, and only then, in her negotiator voice, the one from the diner: “Talk me through the math whenever you’re ready.
All of it. Theo math, us math, oatmeal math.
No scheduling anything at three a.m., that’s my move and it’s copyrighted. ”
“I don’t have math yet,” I said. “I have a stomachache and a courier envelope.”
“Then we sit with the stomachache.” She pushed the migas at me. “Eat. Decisions made hungry are Deacon-quality decisions.”
But I could not sit with it, not all the way, and she knew that too, because at nine that night she handed me my keys off the hook by her door, no speech, and said, “Go ask them. Say hi to Marcus if he’s running the boards late.”
The arena at night in June is a cathedral with the saints on vacation.
Gus let me in, no questions, Gus has never once had a question.
The ice was fresh for a youth camp in the morning, that gray pre-dawn perfect, and the building held the specific silence of sixteen thousand empty seats that had recently been full, which is a different silence than seats that were never full, any goalie will tell you.
I walked out in street shoes, which you are not supposed to do, and stood in my crease, and I put my hand on the crossbar the way you put a hand on a shoulder.
I asked them in Swedish. Out loud, full voice, because there was nobody to keep the ritual small for.
I asked the question the letter asked, the whole thing, the noise and my name and the nine-year-old and the scarf.
And then I stood there and did what the ritual actually is, which took me twenty years and one social media manager to understand: I listened to where I was.
The left post is older. It came over on the truck from the practice facility in year one because the shipment was short, and it has a ding low on the inside from Mason’s one-timer in the first practice this franchise ever held, and it has held its end of the net through every save I made in the only building where a chant ever climbed to a booth.
The posts do not talk. Olle does not talk.
That was never the technology. The technology is that you stand still in the middle of your one wild life and ask, and the asking shows you what you already know, the way saying a problem to Tuna solves it.
Fifty feet up and to the left, the booth window was dark, and it had a shape in it anyway, a taped-up spreadsheet and a ring light named for a queen, second of her name.
Four miles south, a dorm with a common room where teenagers had stood on a couch.
The posts, as ever, said what I already knew.
I laughed. Alone, at midnight, in an empty barn, in street shoes, the face laugh, the real one, echoing off fifty thousand cubic meters of the only address I have.
And up in the dark at the top of the bowl, Gus’s flashlight clicked on and swept the ice once, found me, held a beat, and clicked off, which in Gus is a standing ovation.