41. Zach
ZACH
Mackie is asleep next to me. I can hear her breathing. The apartment is dark and the game is in fourteen hours, but I lie there and stare at the ceiling.
My phone buzzes in the car.
Mackie
I woke up and you were gone
rude
Me
had to go in early
Mackie
I know
there’s a note on the counter that says “gone to rink, game 7, love you”
So romantic
You really captured the moment
Me
was trying to let you sleep
Mackie
I’ve been sleeping fine
YOU’RE the one who’s been staring at the ceiling for hours
don’t think I didn’t notice
Me
I wasn’t staring at the ceiling
Mackie
liar
I could feel you being awake
your awake energy is very loud
Me
I’ll be loud later
Mackie
is that a promise?
Me
go back to sleep Mackie
Mackie
can’t
too busy being in love with a goalie who has a hockey game tonight
it’s very distracting
The facility is quiet with only the lights in Barrett’s office already on. I walk into the locker room, drop into my stall, and close my eyes.
Rodriguez arrives around noon and drops into the stall next to mine.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Can you tell me about the skate laces?”
“Never.”
“Ride or die, Z.”
“Ride or die.”
The building is literally shaking.
The concrete floor of the tunnel vibrates under my skates as the team lines up for the walk out. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals on home ice, completing a comeback from 0-3. Twenty thousand people are on their feet, and the roar when we hit the ice is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
I skate to my crease, look up at the scoreboard—0-0, 20:00—and scan the family suite. I can’t make out faces from here, but I know she’s there.
Standing in my crease while the anthem washes over me, I realize I’m terrified the exact same way I was the night everything started. But this time I know what the terror feels like, and I know I can play through it.
The teams are about to line up for the opening faceoff. I’m in my crease with my stance set when someone skates up behind me. I turn my head and see Jack. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Can you stop the puck?” he says.
I stare at him and nod.
“The boys can do everything else. All you need to do is stop the puck.”
He squeezes my shoulder once before skating to center ice. The referee drops the puck and the game begins.
They come at us in waves and my body answers before my brain does.
Glove up on a one-timer I don’t see until it’s past the screen.
Pad out on a redirect that changes direction twice before it reaches me.
A wrister from the point that catches the edge of my blocker and stings through the padding so hard my fingers go numb for a full shift, but I don’t shake them out.
Shaking them out means I felt it, and I can’t afford to feel anything right now.
1-0 them on a power play, midway through the first. I get my blocker on it but the angle is wrong, and the puck catches the inside edge to deflect past me.
I hear it hit the back of the net before the horn goes, but the building inhales and comes back twice as loud.
This crowd is not going to let a 0-3 comeback die on a single power play goal, and neither am I.
I tap both posts and reset. The goal is already behind me, which means the next shot is the only shot that matters.
Rodriguez ties it three minutes later, 1-1 as the building explodes.
Second period. I skate to my crease and tap both posts before I feel him again. Jack is in the same spot with his hand on my shoulder, repeating his line. “Can you stop the puck? The boys can do the rest. Just stop the puck.”
I make eleven saves in the second, and three of them are saves I won’t remember making until Mackie reminds me later.
A two-on-one where I split so wide my groin screams and the puck hits my pad to send me flat on my back.
A one-timer through traffic where I only know the puck exists because my blocker punches it out of the air before my eyes catch up.
A loose puck sitting six inches from the line that I poke-check into the corner.
The bench erupts and I don’t react, because reacting means I know how close that was. 1-1 after two.
In the third period we throw everything at their goalie and he’s good—he’s been good all series, because this is his last season and he’s not going out without a fight.
Barrett calls a timeout with eight minutes left.
Rodriguez is nodding at the board. Jack is at the front, right next to Barrett, staring at the play with the intensity I’ve seen from him in every big moment for two years.
Five minutes left and Roman takes a tripping penalty. We’re shorthanded and I tell Dex, “I’ve got the back door. You take the one-timer.”
He nods. They move the puck. I track it, reading the rhythm of their power play—pass, pass, look to the one-timer, if it’s not there they go back door. The one-timer’s not there because Dex is in the lane. They go back door, but I’m already sliding across because I trusted the read.
The buzzer sounds. 1-1. Overtime.
We only have a fifteen minute intermission where I’m expecting a full speech, but Barrett simply looks around the room and says, “I’m proud of this group.” His voice doesn’t crack, but it comes close.
Rodriguez sits down next to me and leans his shoulder into mine without saying a single word. He just sits there, breathing hard, sweat dripping onto the floor between his skates.
We file out for overtime. I skate to my crease, tap both posts, and he’s there. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is covered in sweat and he looks like a man who’s been playing hockey for twenty years, because he has.
“Can you stop the puck?”
“Yeah, Jack. I can stop the puck.”
“I know you will, kid,” he says, and then he’s gone and the puck drops.
I make three saves in the first five minutes.
Clean saves. Position saves. The kind where my body is where it needs to be before the shot comes, and the puck just finds me.
I think about Barrett saying the goalie’s job is to be the last voice the defense hears, and I’m loud.
Calling switches, directing traffic, slapping my stick on the ice when the rotation breaks down.
Dex looks back at me after the third save, and I see something in his face I haven’t seen yet this series. Hope.
Eight minutes in. Their forward gets a breakaway, but I know him and I know he’s tired.
I can see it in the way his hands sit lower on his stick than they were in the first, meaning he’s going to shoot because he doesn’t have the legs to deke anymore.
My brain goes quiet, leaving nothing but geometry, instinct, and the six inches between my glove and the puck’s trajectory.
He shoots glove side. High. I’m already there.
The crowd noise hits me a half-second late like a wave that was waiting to break.
I stand in my crease holding the puck while everyone screams, feeling Mackie somewhere in that building willing this into me. I squeeze it and I breathe.
The next minute plays out like a recap. I can see each move develop in real time and my brain processes it at normal speed, except it feels like it happens in slow motion.
Rodriguez wins a faceoff in their zone. Dex moves it to Brody, the defense shifts, the lane opens, and Brody slips it down to Rodriguez in the circle.
Rodriguez looks up and Anderson is there.
Twenty years of hockey means your body knows where to be.
He’s driving to the net with a defenseman on his hip, stick on the ice, and the pass is perfect—flat, hard, right on his tape—and he redirects it mid-stride.
The puck changes direction off his blade and goes far side, top corner, as the horn sounds.
We win.
WE WIN.
The bench empties. Every body on the ice converges on Jack, with Rodriguez reaching him first to crash into him.
Dex and Brody follow, and the whole team swarms the goal scorer the way they always do, sticks and gloves flying.
I’m skating as fast as my legs will carry me from the far end of the ice, because goalies are always the last to arrive.
Rodriguez sees me coming, grabs my mask, and rips it off my head so the cold air hits my face.
I’m in the middle of it, arms wrapped around whoever is closest, screaming something I can’t hear over the noise.
The swarm breaks apart slowly. Rodriguez peels off to skate to the glass where Juliette is pressing both hands against it.
Dex drops to his knees at center ice. Roman stands alone with his arms up and his eyes closed, like he’s praying or celebrating or both.
And Jack is standing where the celebration started, helmet off, hair plastered to his forehead, breathing hard.
The handshake line. Two teams, exhausted, filing past each other.
Then the Cup is on the ice and the building noise shifts into something else entirely—something that’s been building for weeks.
The commissioner says something into a microphone that nobody hears, and Roman skates forward to lift the Cup over his head as the crowd roars.
Roman skates a lap, taking his time because he’s earned every second of it. Coming back to the group, he looks around and hands the Cup to Jack—the golden goal scorer, the twenty-year veteran, the man who redirected a pass in overtime to put it top corner and end this thing.
Jack lifts it. The building erupts again and he skates his lap. I watch him carry it, this man I lied to, who put his hand on my shoulder four times tonight and asked me if I could stop the puck for his team.
He finishes his lap and skates back. He should hand it to Dex, or Brody, or literally anyone who’s been here longer than me and didn’t spend the first two years of their career on the bench.
But he skates straight toward me, holding the Cup out with both hands, and waits for me to take it.
I look at his face. It’s not forgiveness, but it’s something that says: you stopped the puck. You did what I asked you to do. And right now, in this moment, on this ice, that matters more than everything else between us.
I lift it over my head with shaking arms. I’ve been chasing this dream for my entire life, and right now it’s real and solid and mine.
The noise hits me, my eyes blurring as I skate a lap I won't even remember.
I just remember the weight, the noise, and the feeling that this is exactly what I wished for that night.
They finally open the ice to families and I see her rushing toward me, moving fast and slipping every third step without slowing down. She’s laughing and crying at the same time, looking like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
She reaches me at full speed and I catch her, wrapping both arms around her waist to lift her off the ice.
She weighs nothing compared to everything I’ve been carrying.
I spin her right there, in front of the cameras, the crew, and thousands of people still celebrating with us, and she puts her hands on my cheeks.
“You stopped the puck,” she says through tears. “I knew you would.”
I set her down and she fists my jersey in both hands, pulling my face down to hers to kiss me. I don’t care who sees us. I am so done caring who sees it.
When I pull back, Jack is standing ten feet away with his arm around Chloe’s shoulders. He nods at me and it’s not acceptance, not yet, but it’s close.
I look up at the scoreboard. 2-1. The clock reads 0:00.
I hold Mackie on the ice as the confetti falls, thinking about truth or dare. The question and the answer.
To win the Cup as the starting goalie.
I guess I won.