27. Zach
ZACH
Rodriguez is weird at breakfast.
Not weird in a way anyone else would notice, because Rodriguez has a wide spectrum of normal and most of it looks unhinged to outside observers.
But I’ve been eating pre-game meals with this guy for two years.
I know his rhythms the way I know shot trajectories—instinctively, without thinking about it—and today the rhythm’s off.
He’s too bright. Too loud. He’s doing the Rodriguez performance, the one that plays great on camera and in locker rooms, but his eyes keep landing on me and sliding away.
“You good?” I ask him over eggs at the diner we’ve begun frequenting on game days.
“Great. Amazing. Never better.” He shoves a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth and chews aggressively. “Why wouldn’t I be good? It’s Game 7. I’m so good. I’m incredibly good.”
“You’re being weird.”
“I’m not being weird. This is baseline. You’re projecting your own goalie weirdness onto me because you’re the one starting tonight and your brain is looking for problems everywhere.” He points at me with his fork. “Classic deflection. I read about it.”
“You did not read about deflection.”
“Juliette has a book. About athletic psychology. I’ve been reading it.” He takes a sip of coffee. His hand is steady, and his voice is steady, but his eyes won’t hold mine for more than two seconds. “Point is, you’re nervous, I’m fine, eat your eggs.”
I eat my eggs. I let it go because today of all days I don’t have the bandwidth to decode whatever Rodriguez is doing, and because he’s probably right—I’m projecting.
My brain is a search engine for things to worry about and right now the query is running at maximum capacity: Game 7, starting, Luca suspended, the breakaway I guessed wrong on replaying behind my eyes every time I blink.
We go to the gym. I do my pre-game routine: thirty minutes of light stretching, foam roller, hip mobility work.
It’s the same sequence I’ve done since juniors.
Rodriguez is on the bike next to me talking about Juliette’s choreography for a competition she’s going to train for in the summer.
It’s normal—he talks about Juliette constantly—but halfway through a sentence about a jump sequence he stops, looks at me, and says “you’re a good person, Z” completely unprompted.
Then he goes back to pedaling like nothing happened.
“Thanks?”
“Just felt like saying it. No reason.” He pedals faster. “Anyway, the jump. So she lands it about sixty percent of the time in practice but in competition it drops to like forty-five because of the adrenaline and she’s been working on this breathing technique to—”
I tune back out and let his voice fill the space and try not to think about tonight.
The nap doesn’t happen. I lie on my bed for ninety minutes with my eyes closed running the game in my head—their tendencies, their top line, who shoots first and who dekes, the power play formation, the weak side they overload—and every scenario ends at the same place: the breakaway from Game 6, the half-second where I committed too early, the puck sliding past my pad into the open net.
I change the variable. This time I hold.
I wait. I read instead of guess. The puck hits my glove and stays out.
I run it again. I guess wrong. Again. I hold.
Every version of tonight lives or dies on whether I can stay patient when my body wants to panic.
I let my thoughts drift to Mackie, standing in my kitchen this morning in one sock making me drink spinach because she read an article once and decided it was gospel. The thought doesn’t calm me down exactly but it shifts the frequency from panic to something I can breathe through.
I get dressed. Navy suit. Navy tie. The solid one, not the paisley, because Mackie’s right about most things but she was wrong about paisley and I’m not planning on changing up my game day suit any time soon.
The arena is different on Game 7 nights.
The hallways are louder before we even get there, a noise that starts in the parking garage and gets stronger the closer you get to the ice.
By the time I’m walking down the tunnel with my headphones on, I can feel it in the floor vibrating up through my shoes.
The locker room is quiet when I walk in.
Dex is taping his stick. Brody’s lying on the floor with his eyes closed.
Jack is sitting in his stall reading something on his phone with the calm of a man who has played a thousand of these games.
Rodriguez is already half-dressed, pads on, and he watches me walk to my stall and looks away fast.
I start getting dressed. Base layer first, socks, knee guards, then pants.
It’s the same order since I was fourteen, because the order is the structure, and the structure is what keeps me from thinking too hard about what happens when I’m done putting all of this on.
My hands are steady. They’ve been steady all day, which surprises me, because after the performance of the past two games I expected to be more of a wreck than I am.
Barrett comes in twenty minutes before warmups.
He’s not a speech guy—his thing is the specific, the tactical, the “here’s what we’re going to do and here’s how we’re going to do it” approach that makes the game feel manageable instead of enormous.
But tonight he stands in the middle of the room and doesn’t say anything for so long that I can feel the panic creeping up my throat.
“Gentlemen,” he says. “Sixty minutes. That’s all this is.
Sixty minutes of hockey. We’ve played sixty minutes of hockey plenty of times this year.
This isn’t special. This isn’t different.
This is the same game you’ve been playing since you were kids on ponds and in garages and on outdoor rinks where you couldn’t feel your face.
” He looks around the room and his eyes stop on me for a beat longer than anyone else.
“Play your game. Trust your training. Trust your teammates. Nothing else matters.”
He walks out and the room exhales.
Jack stands up. Pulls his jersey over his head. Taps the A on his chest twice—this thing he does before every game, I’ve watched him do it from my stall all season—and looks around.
“Nothing to say that Barrett didn’t already say. Sixty minutes. Let’s go get ‘em.”
Guys are up and moving. Rodriguez is next to me suddenly, hand on my shoulder.
He leans in and says, “you’ve got this, Z, I promise you’ve got this.
” His voice is shaking, which doesn’t make sense, because Rodriguez’s voice doesn’t shake before games.
Not ever. I tap his hand, nod, and pull my mask on.
The ice feels right under my skates, and I know immediately that tonight is different from Game 6.
The lag is gone. The disconnect between my eyes and my hands has closed.
When Brody fires the first warmup shot at me, my glove finds it clean and quick.
The sound of it hitting leather sends a signal through my whole body that says here.
I’m here. The second shot is low blocker and I kick it out.
The third is high glove and I catch it. The fourth is a wrister that I swallow with my chest. I can feel the rhythm building, a metronome in my muscles that says stay, wait, read, react.
I grab my water bottle from the top of the net and tilt my head back and squeeze it over my face and let it run down through my hair and over my neck and into my pads.
The cold snaps everything into focus. I shake my head once and the water sprays off and I pull my mask back down and tap both posts and I’m ready.
Mackie is in the building. I don’t look, but I can feel it. I know.
First period. The crowd is at a volume I didn’t know was possible.
The first shift is fast—faster than anything in Games 1 through 6—because Game 7 eliminates any limits that players have on their bodies, and everything comes out raw and desperate.
Their center throws it at me from the right circle and I see it all the way.
My blocker redirects it into the corner and the crowd screams, and that’s one.
The period is twenty minutes of the most physical hockey I’ve ever been part of.
Bodies everywhere, hits that rattle the glass, scrums after every whistle.
I stop eleven shots. Some of them are routine—positional saves where I’m in the right place because I studied their tendencies obsessively.
Some of them are reactions, pure instinct, the puck appearing out of a screen of bodies and my body moving before I can think about it.
None of them are goals. The period ends 0-0.
Second period. They score first off a deflection while my brain is already doing the autopsy, measuring the distance between where my pad was and where it needed to be. Inches. It’s always inches.
I take a breath. I get up. I don’t look at anyone.
The next three minutes are the hardest three minutes of my career.
My brain wants to replay the deflection, and my body wants to tighten up.
Every shot carries the weight of the one that just got through.
I have to actively fight the impulse to overcommit, to reach, to try too hard.
Trying too hard is how you give up goals.
You stop trusting your position and start chasing.
I stop the next shot. And the next. And the next.
Rodriguez ties it eight minutes before the end of the second. He takes a pass from Brody at the blue line and rips a wrister that beats their goalie clean and the building explodes and afterward he looks directly at me, not at the camera, not at the crowd, at me, and points.
1-1 going into the third.