25. Zach
ZACH
I’ve got headphones on over my baseball hat, hood pulled up over that which should definitely be the universal sign for “leave me the fuck alone” but apparently not to the Puckaneers’ social media coordinator, who appears out of nowhere with her phone already recoding and a smile that’s way too bright for a day like this.
“No, sorry, I can’t today.”
Her face falls before she catches it, the perky professional smile snapping back into place.
I feel like an asshole. She’s just doing her job, and I’m usually fine with the media stuff.
I actually don’t mind her—she never asks the bullshit gotcha questions unless Rodriguez puts her up to it.
But today I can’t stand in front of a camera and pretend to be confident and prepared. I’m not.
“That’s okay,” she says, and her voice is still bright but I can hear the slight edge underneath it, the well-that’s-never-happened-before of it all. “Maybe after the game we can—”
“Z! There he is, my guy, my brother, my perpetually single bestie who won’t return my texts!”
Rodriguez materializes and throws an arm around my shoulder, pulling me into his side as he turns to face the camera with the kind of grin that makes him the team’s media darling.
He’s saying something about how they’re fired up, how the boys are feeling good.
I slip out from under his arm and keep walking toward the plane.
I hear him ask if she wants him to do some trending little dance and I know he’s buying me time, covering for me the way he always does even though I’ve never once asked him to.
The plane is half-full when I board. Guys nod at me as I pass, a few shoulder claps, the quiet kind of support that’s somehow worse than if they just ignored me because it means they might be worried.
And the only thing worse than being the guy who let in the goals is being the guy everyone’s tiptoeing around because of it.
I find my usual seat against the window near the back, away from the card games and the noise, and I’m starting to think I might get a few minutes alone when Jack Anderson sits next to me.
“This one taken?”
“No, go ahead.”
He settles in and I try not to look at him too long because every time I do my brain serves up the image of his daughter straddling me on my couch twelve hours ago, and I have to physically redirect my thoughts the way you’d yank your car from driving directly into oncoming traffic.
“How you holding up?” he asks, and his voice is so genuine that my skin crawls with it.
“I’m okay. Nervous, I guess.”
“That’s normal.” He takes a sip of his coffee and leans back. I don’t think I’ll ever understand how a person does that—how you play in this league for almost twenty years and still manage to be calm before playoff games. “You know what I’ve learned about nerves?”
“What’s that?”
“They don’t go away. You just get better at playing through them.” He shrugs, and it’s the same shrug Mackie does, the same easy roll of the shoulders. “Your body knows what to do. You’ve put in the work. Just gotta trust it.”
“Mm-hmm.” Which is all I can manage because he’s being kind to me and I am lying to his face every single day. “Thanks, Jack.”
“I mean it. The boys believe in you. I believe in you.” He claps me on the shoulder.
His hand sits there for a second, the weight of it making me want to confess everything.
I see myself opening my mouth and letting it all pour out, ready to accept whatever comes after.
Anything to stop feeling like this. “We’re gonna be fine. ”
He pulls out his phone and starts scrolling. I turn toward the window, focusing on my breathing.
My phone buzzes. I’m 99% certain it’s Mackie. I shouldn’t check it with her dad sitting right here, but my hands are already moving, pulling it out and tilting the screen away from him on pure instinct.
Mackie
good morning future game 6 hero
I woke up and you aren’t here and your bed smells like you and I’m big sad about it
anyway here’s some motivation for later
And then a photo.
I don’t open it. I can see the preview, and that’s enough. It’s her in my jersey, nothing else, taken from an angle that makes my whole body run hot. I fumble the phone so hard it nearly flies out of my hands.
“You good?” Jack asks, glancing over.
“Yep, fine, slippery case.”
I shove the phone under my thigh and stare straight ahead and try to bring my heart rate back down to something that won’t kill me.
After a minute, when I’m sure he’s not paying attention, I pull it back out.
Me
Mackie. Your father is sitting next to me on this plane. Right now. As I type this.
I cannot open that photo.
I’m going to pass out.
Mackie
omg hi dad
jk jk don’t show him that
but also like
he can’t see your phone right?
so what’s the problem
Me
The problem is I’m trying not to have a visible hard on while making small talk with your father about the game tonight.
Mackie
is it working
Me
No.
Mackie
lmaooooo
okay okay I’ll behave
but you should save those pics for later
consider it a reward for winning
Me
And if we don’t win?
Mackie
then consider it a consolation prize
either way YOU win
that’s the mackie guarantee
Me
I don’t think that’s how sports work.
Mackie
it’s how dating me works
go be a hero baby
I love you
I stare at those three words for maybe thirty seconds. She said it like it was nothing—like it was obvious—and maybe that’s the point. Maybe for her it is.
Me
I love you too.
I put the phone away and spend the rest of the flight pretending to sleep while my brain does what it always does—runs the variables, calculates the exposure, measures the distance between where I am and where everything falls apart.
Barrett called me in two hours before the bus to the airport and I sat across his desk, waiting for him to tell me they were calling someone up from the AHL. Which is the right move and makes complete sense when your backup goalie just went tits up in a playoff game.
Barrett leaned back and looked at me the way he looks at everyone—like the decision’s already made and the conversation is a courtesy.
“It’s your net now.”
I waited for the qualifier. The until or the unless or the for now. It didn’t come.
“Mine,” I said, because I needed to hear it back.
“Yours. Game 6, Game 7 if we need it. You’re my guy.” He picked up his coffee like we were talking about hotel assignments. “Get your head right. I need you sharp.”
I stood in the hallway outside his office for thirty seconds staring at the fire extinguisher on the wall because I didn’t know where else to look.
My net. Not Luca’s net that I’m borrowing.
Not the net that needs a real goalie they haven’t called up yet.
Mine. And the thing about Barrett is he doesn’t say things to make you feel better.
He says things because he’s already made the decision.
The game goes wrong from the start, and I can feel it in my body before I can name it—my edges are a fraction too slow on every push, my glove is arriving where the puck was instead of where it’s going, and there’s a lag between what my eyes are reading and what my muscles are doing that shouldn’t be there.
Like the signal’s getting lost somewhere between my brain and my hands.
We go down 1-0 in the first that I see the whole way.
That’s the part that’s hard to explain to people who don’t play goal—sometimes it’s not that you lose it, it’s that you see it perfectly and your body just doesn’t get there.
My glove was late. Not by much. By the kind of much that still counts.
The puck hit the back of the net and I didn’t feel anything for a second, just this flat quiet, and then the crowd noise came back in and I skated back to my post and didn’t look at anyone.
I’ve been waiting for the proof that I’m not good enough, and here it is, sitting in the back of my net for eighteen thousand people to see.
By the second period we’re tied and I start to think maybe I’m wrong, maybe I can do this.
I make a few saves that actually feel right—the kind where your body moves before your brain catches up and the puck hits leather and stays out the way it’s supposed to.
A cross-ice one-timer that I get a piece of with my blocker.
A redirect from the slot that I swallow with my chest. For ten minutes I feel like a goalie again.
The lag disappears, everything syncs up, and I think okay, okay, maybe.
Third period, still tied 2-2, and the crowd is deafening with the voices of eighteen thousand people wanting me to fail.
Four minutes left.
Their forward gets a breakaway and suddenly it’s me and him and seventy feet of ice, and my brain kicks into the read—his speed, the angle of his stick, the way his hips are squared.
He’s going to deke. I know he’s going to deke because his hands are too quiet, he’s not loading up for a shot, and I need to stay patient, hold my position and let him make the first move and react instead of guess.
I guess.
He sells left, and I bite. I drop into the butterfly a half-second too early, committing to a read I wasn’t sure of.
My body is ahead of my brain again, but this time in the wrong direction.
He goes right. The puck slides past my pad—a clean finish into the open net.
The arena explodes while I stay on my knees in the crease, glove pressed flat against the ice.
3-2.
I knew before he made his move. I knew I was going to guess wrong, and I did it anyway, because when you’re rattled you stop trusting the process and start gambling, and gambling is how backup goalies become former goalies.
We don’t score again.
The final buzzer sounds and it’s over. The series is tied and we’re going back to Seattle for Game 7 and I am the reason.