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“I keep hearing it,” I tell her. “In my head. Both of them, at once.”

“Me too.” She wipes her face, laughing a little at herself. “I don’t think I fully believed it either. Not until just now.”

“I need to win tonight.” I say it plain, no drama in it, just fact. “Not for the draft. Not even really for the team. I need to skate out there tonight and play like I’ve got two reasons bigger than hockey watching me, because I do.”

“You’ve always had reasons bigger than hockey.” She takes my hand again. “You just didn’t always let yourself believe that was allowed.”

I think about that the whole drive back to the hotel — the specific truth of it, the years I spent believing hockey had to be the only thing, the only worthy investment of everything I had, because nothing else in my life had ever felt secure enough to build alongside it. Two heartbeats change that permanently. I don’t think I fully understood until this morning how much room a person actually has, once they stop being afraid to make some of it.

The locker room before a national championship has a specific quality of quiet that no other game produces.

Not nervous-quiet. Focused-quiet. Every guy in this room has been building toward this exact night since September, and now that it’s here, nobody needs to say much about it. Cash isn’t even talking, which might be the single strangest thing I’ve witnessed all season, and I catch Wyatt giving him a look across the room that says he’s noticed it too.

I lace my skates the same way I always do. Left first, then right, the same tension in the laces every single time, a ritual I’ve kept since I was nine years old and haven’t questioned since. Around me, guys go through their own versions of the same thing — Wyatt taping his stick with the same three motions, someone’s headphones playing something low enough I can’t make out the song, the specific charged silence of a room that knows exactly what’s at stake tonight and has decided not to talk about it directly.

Coach O’Grady runs through the game plan one more time — Harvard’s forecheck, their power play tendencies, the specific defensive assignments — and I listen the way I always listen, full attention, nothing else in my head. He’s calm about it, the same measured tone he’s used all season, no extra weight added to the words even though everyone in this room understands the weight is already there.

“One game,” he says, at the end of it. “Sixty minutes. You’ve built three years toward exactly this. Go take it.”

I carry something into this locker room that wasn’t here an hour ago — two heartbeats, still echoing somewhere behind my ribs, the specific fullness of a morning that changed the shape of tonight before tonight even started. I’m the most settled I’ve ever been walking into the biggest game of my life. That’s not nothing. If anything, it’s the whole difference.

Warmups, I find them both before the horn sounds.

Section four, same as always, except tonight it’s not just Margo. My mom’s beside her, the two of them already deep in conversation like they’ve known each other years instead of months, and something in my chest does the specific thing it does every time I see the two most important women in my life occupying the same space without me having to manage the introduction. My mom made the drive down that afternoon, straight off a shift, still running on caffeine and adrenaline and the specific stubborn love of a woman who wasn’t going to miss this even if it killed her. She texted me this morning: wouldn’t miss it for the world, baby. See you tonight.

Margo catches me looking. She doesn’t do the subtle thing anymore — no careful shift in posture, no coded signal only I’d catch. She just waves, big and unashamed, and my mom waves too, and half the building probably sees it and I don’t care even slightly. There’s a specific freedom in that — in not having to manage who sees what, in not calculating the angle of a glance. I spent months getting good at hiding this. I’m getting better, faster than I expected, at not hiding it at all.

I skate my lap. I check the ice, the give in my knees, the specific cold that clears my head before a game like this. I feel settled in a way that used to scare me and now just feels like home. Two heartbeats, still with me. I carry them out onto the ice the same way I carry everything else that matters — quiet, close, entirely mine.

First period is tight, physical, exactly what you’d expect from two teams that have both been building toward this since fall.

Harvard’s good. Deep, well-coached, disciplined in a way that makes every shift a genuine fight for inches. Their top defenseman reads the ice almost as well as I do, and I spend the first ten minutes finding out exactly how good their forecheck actually is by getting hit clean twice in a row. Neither is a bad hit, exactly — just the specific relentless physicality of a team that’s decided the only way to beat us is to make every single puck battle cost something.

Landon Cruz is the name on the back of Harvard’s best forward, and I clock him early — fast, skilled, chippy in a way that reads as deliberate rather than accidental. He’s good enough to earn his ice time honestly and mean enough to make every shift against him cost something extra. He’s got the specific look of a guy who’s used to being the best player on every ice surface he’s ever stood on, and the specific edge of a guy who’s found other ways to win when the pure hockey isn’t quite tilting his direction.

I don’t know until later that he and Cash have history. I just know, watching from my own position on the ice, that every time Cruz gets near Cash he says something — quick, quiet, gone before the ref can catch it — and Cash’s face does something I’ve never seen it do before. Not anger, exactly. Something closer to pain wearing anger’s clothes. It happens twice in the first period alone, brief exchanges I catch only in fragments, and each time Cash skates away from it a little tighter than before, a little further from the loose, chaotic energy that’s carried him through three years of this program.

I don’t think much of it in the moment. There’s a hockey game happening and my head’s mostly on the game. It’s only later, replaying it, that I understand I was watching something build the entire first period without knowing what it was.

It happens in the second period.

Cruz catches Cash along the boards, a hit that’s borderline but not flagrant — the kind refs let go in a game this physical — and as Cash goes down, Cruz leans in close, says something low enough that I only catch the shape of it from twenty feet away, not the words.

Cash comes up swinging.

It happens fast — Cash’s gloves off before the whistle’s even fully blown, Cruz matching him, the two of them tangled in a real fight, not the choreographed kind, the kind where you can tell one person actually means it. Cash lands two clean before the linesmen get between them, both benches half up, the crowd roaring, and by the time it’s sorted out both players are headed to the box and then, for Cash, straight to the locker room. Match penalty. Ejection.

I catch Wyatt’s face across the ice — pure confusion, the specific bewilderment of a guy who’s known Cash three years and has never once seen him actually lose control like that. Cash is the guy who laughs off everything, who’s never once thrown a punch in anger in three seasons together, who’d rather talk his way out of a confrontation than start one. Watching him go after Cruz with that kind of full, unguarded fury doesn’t compute against anything I know about him.

Beau’s voice cuts through the bench chaos before Coach even gets a word out.

“Regroup,” he says. Captain-voice, even though he’s not suited up, standing behind the bench in his warmups instead of his gear, the brace long gone now but his season already over before it started, a specific loss he’s carried quietly all year and has never once let show on the bench. “We’re down a man for two minutes and we have a game to win. Focus.”

I skate to the bench during the stoppage. “What happened?”

“I don’t know yet.” Beau’s jaw is tight, watching Cash disappear down the tunnel. “But I know Cash. He doesn’t do that. Not like that. Whatever Cruz said, it wasn’t nothing.”

We kill the penalty. It costs us — Harvard’s power play is sharp, and they nearly capitalize twice before we finally clear it, the whole building holding its breath through both close calls — but we hold, and the game keeps moving, and it’s not until the intermission that I hear the shape of it from Wyatt, who heard it from someone on Harvard’s bench who used to play with Cruz at a prep school outside Boston.