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“He's going to listen to us when the game's over,” she says satisfied, and turns back to the ice. “He always comes to us first.”

He always comes to us first.

She says it the way you say things that are simply facts of the world, the sky is blue, water is cold, Daddy comes to us first.

She's right.

He always does.

Third period.

The game is close in a way it wasn't for most of the second. Vermont has found something in the intermission, a gear they weren't using, and the third period opens with them immediately pushing on the forecheck in a way that shifts the energy in the building. Xaden is everywhere, which is the only word for it. There is no tactical description I have that covers it adequately. He is just everywhere, reading the ice two moves ahead of everyone else on it, appearing in places he should not logistically have reached in the time available.

Em is standing for most of the third.

She has finished her snack and she has both hands on the seat in front of her and she is watching with an intensity I recognize down to the specific angle of her chin.

“He's tired,” she says, at one point, without looking at me.

I look at the ice. He doesn't look tired to me, he moves the same way he moved in the first. Same precision, same controlled aggression but there is something, something I would only catch after years of watching him, a half-second delay on one turn that isn't usually there.

“He'll be fine,” I say.

“I know he will,” she says. “He doesn't stop when he's tired. He says that's when it matters most.”

I did not know he had told her that.

I file it.

Four minutes left, 3-2, our lead. Vermont pulls their goalie with two minutes to go and the rink becomes the specific kind of loud that means everyone understands what is at stake and is no longer performing their enthusiasm, just feeling it.

Xaden takes a hit along the boards, a big one, the kind that draws a sound from the crowd and I’m on my feet before I decide to be. Em's hand finds my sleeve again.

He bounces off the boards.

He keeps moving.

He always keeps moving.

Em lets go of my sleeve and exhales and I realize she was holding her breath the same way I was. She looks up at me and something in her face, the small furrowing of the brow, the way she exhales through her nose is so precisely her father that I have to look away from it.

Ninety seconds.

Xaden gets the puck at the near blue line and I watch him make the calculation, I can see it, the three-second stillness before the move that looks like everything happening at once and then he drives the net and gets the puck on goal. The Vermont defender trips trying to follow him and the referee's arm goes up.

Penalty.

Power play.

Em makes a sound that is pure satisfaction.

Sixty seconds on the power play. The arena is standing. The noise is at the register that means people have stopped thinking and started just feeling it collectively, the specific frequency of a crowd that knows what's about to happen.

The face-off is in Vermont's zone. Xaden lines up. The puck drops.

It takes him eleven seconds.

I count them after the fact, in the specific quiet inside the enormous noise. Eleven seconds from face-off to the puck in the back of the net, top shelf, the goalie's glove nowhere near it. The arena goes from electric to something else entirely, relief and triumph and that specific roar that I know now as the sound of this team's fans deciding they always believed.