Chapter Twenty-Eight
SAINT
Training camp, season three, day one, and the first thing I saw walking into the room was Pickle’s mustache, which had spent the summer in some kind of accelerated program and now preceded him by a distance I would call unsafe.
“Veteran year,” he told me, solemn, at his stall. “The mustache has tenure.”
“The mustache has a no-trade clause,” Mason said from across the room, and the room laughed, and I stood in the doorway for a second and took the reading, because that is what I do with rooms now instead of avoiding them.
New season, same barn. Two rookies from the draft looking exactly as terrified as Pickle looked two years ago, already seated on either side of him like he was a veteran, which, catastrophically, he now was.
Barb’s whiteboard already annotated in her surgical all-caps.
Tuna asleep in my stall in the taco bed, which had survived a summer of laundering and diplomacy, one folded ear twitching at the noise.
Camp is my favorite liturgy. Everything in September is a rope you get to weave fresh.
The oatmeal moved to 8:40 for morning skates, same recipe, the schedule bends but the recipe is doctrine.
The pipes got their first taps of the year before the first drill, twice left, twice right, and the left post still had Mason’s ding in it, and the new backup, a polite giant from Saskatchewan, watched me do it and asked no questions, which told me the scouting report on me had circulated and been believed.
The only wrong note in the room, and it had been wrong so long the room had stopped hearing it, was the shoulder.
Mason’s right shoulder had been quietly incorrect for two full seasons.
The whole locker room knew it the way you know a stair is soft, you step around it without discussing it.
He’d played through it on tape and ibuprofen and charm, and in the playoffs he’d scored a series-winner with it, and all summer, per the group chat, he had “rehabbed,” which in Mason means he bought a resistance band and photographed it once.
Day two of camp, he came off the ice from a shooting drill with his arm held the way you hold a grocery bag with a bad handle, grinning at everybody, and Noa was standing at the tunnel with her arms crossed, and she watched him fake his way through unstrapping his gloves, and she said, “Duffy. My office. Bring the shoulder and leave the personality.”
“It’s one appointment,” Mason said to the room, cheerful, following her.
“It’s a season-long treatment plan, effective today, and I’ve already cleared it with Barb,” Noa said, not turning around, and the door closed on whatever his face did, and that was that. Handed over. Full-time. The stair finally on the maintenance list.
Pickle looked at me across the room and mouthed, is he in trouble. I nodded, because yes, although not the kind either of them was expecting, and that is a story that belongs to somebody else’s book.
Day three, the rookies discovered the Tuna protocols.
There is a binder. Junie made it two seasons ago as a joke and Gus adopted it as scripture, and it lives on the shelf above the skate sharpener with laminated tabs.
It covers the taco bed’s laundering schedule, the fruit bowl treaty, the ranked list of stalls Tuna may occupy by seniority, and the rule, bolded, that nobody feeds her before a home game, because a fed cat will not perform starvation for the concourse crowd and the content suffers.
The Saskatchewan backup read it cover to cover like a systems manual and asked one clarifying question about section four, which was the correct question.
The other rookie, a winger out of Michigan with a haircut he would grow out of, held the binder at arm’s length and asked if it was a bit.
“Nothing in this room is a bit,” Pickle told him, mustache first. “Everything in this room is load-bearing.” Which was my sentence originally, and I let him keep it, because that is how a room raises people.
The betting board opened for the season the same week.
Bryce runs the book now, in a spreadsheet with a password Junie cracked in a day and monitors quietly for compliance purposes.
New season, new markets: date of the first Rich cry, heavy action on the home opener.
First Barb sentence to exceed nine words, long odds, correctly.
Games until the Michigan kid stepped on the logo carpet and the room went silent at him, line set at four.
He lasted two, and the silence taught him more than the binder did.
Barb’s camp speech happened day one and took less time than the stretching.
She walked to the middle of the room, gum going, surveyed forty large men in a state of maximum ambition, and said, “Attendance was last year. Standards are this year.” Eight words.
She chewed once and left. The Michigan kid waited for the rest of the speech.
Pickle put a hand on his shoulder. “That was all of it,” he said. “You’ll learn to ration.”
The other new thing in my season, and I concede this freely, is that I do press now.
Not much. Nobody wants much, least of all the press.
But the days of Val doing her nightly liturgy of the goaltender does not do availability are over.
The system we developed, and by we I mean Junie developed it and presented it to me with slides, is four sentences.
After a game, I stop at the scrum, and I give them four sentences, built at whatever the morning’s oatmeal hour was, load-bearing, no filler.
The press calls them Lindell Fours. There is, I am reliably informed, a fan account that posts them in serif font on plain backgrounds like scripture, and I have elected not to understand that either.
Here is the truth about why I stopped hating it, and this stays between us and whoever buys the paperback.
The booth has a window, and the window has a woman in it, and the woman watches every clip the same night, professionally, at her desk, under Beyoncé the Second, with her headphones on.
And when a Lindell Four lands right, when the fourth sentence turns just enough to be a joke a beat after everyone stops listening for one, I don’t hear the hallway laugh.
I hear, in my head, a specific laugh from a specific analyst fifty feet up and to the left, the laugh I used to find in the tunnel by ritual, and I build the fourth sentence for that laugh, every single time, the way Olle used to leave one board unpainted on purpose so my grandmother would come out and ask about it.
Exhibition opener, I stopped a breakaway in the third with the paddle, pure larceny, and afterward the scrum asked how, and my four were: “He telegraphed it at the blue line. His head does a thing. I won’t say what thing, he’s a nice kid. Watch his head.”
Junie’s text arrived eleven minutes later, from inside the same building, three words: HIS HEAD DOES A THING. Followed by the crying-laughing thing she knows I disapprove of. Followed by: analytics dept confirms the booth laughed. sample size one. statistically significant.
Camp media day tested the system under load.
Media day is the one date on the calendar when availability is not optional, an hour of lights and lenses and the same six questions wearing different lanyards.
I gave every outlet exactly four sentences, per doctrine, and the doctrine held, and one national feed ran a segment titled THE ECONOMY OF LARS LINDELL, which Junie clipped, captioned “scarcity pricing,” and pushed to two million people before I finished my cooldown.
That night the committee convened on the season’s real business.
Mason: committee update: wedding when Saint: it’s been one season. Mason: dilly-dally Noa: leave him alone. Noa: (but wedding when.)
I put the phone face down next to Olle’s dented pot, where it buzzed twice more, left then right, or that is how I chose to hear it.