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Emil comes down to my end at half past, because he takes the first shots on the second goalie and I take the first shots on him. It’s a thing we’ve done since November without ever having discussed it. He goes glove, glove, blocker, five hole. I turn all four aside. He laughs at the last one, then skates a circle.

“Your feet are late,” I say.

“My feet are unbelievable.”

“Your feet are late on the third one. You were square before you were set.”

He does it again, and he’s right. He taps his stick on the ice twice on his way past.

I go through the posts on my way to the bench—left twice, right twice, same order.

And when I turn back around, the tunnel mouth has a man standing in it.

Not the concourse. Not the club seats, where a financial manager with a manifest pass would sit. The mouth of the tunnel at the corner of the rink, where the off-ice officials, emergency goaltender, and ice-paddle guy stand. Eight feet from the boards. Nobody stands there unless they work here.

Gray coat. No lanyard showing. Hands at his sides, not in his pockets.

He’s looking at me and he doesn’t do anything with his face at all. The horn goes for the end of warmup. I skate past him, and neither of us moves a muscle.

The first period starts.

I keep waiting for the game to feel different. It doesn’t. Pittsburgh forechecks hard for the first two minutes. Beau eats a hit in the corner, gets up talking. There’s a whistle at 1:12 for a hand pass. The guy who takes the faceoff to my left is a kid I played against in juniors who’s now thirty and has a bad knee.

I stop a shot from the slot at 2:40. I stop a wraparound at 3:55 and cover it. The whistle goes. I get up, scrape the crease, and knock both posts twice.

Zero-zero.

At 5:52, they come through the neutral zone with speed and dump it. We turn it and lose it at our own blue line. Their defenseman steps up into the space at the point.

I know it four full seconds before it happens.

He’s a right shot, walking to his forehand. Two bodies cross in front of me: our winger, their center. The lane is going to open on the inside of that traffic for about a third of a second.

Get the shoulder to it just slightly late. Let it go past the elbow.

I go down a fraction early. That’s the crime—one fraction in a career of four thousand hours. My glove comes up on the wrong plane, too low by a hand’s width. The puck goes over it, off the inside post, in.

Silence. Then eighteen thousand make the noise—that low ohhh rising, falling, done in two seconds. The horn blares. Their bench rises and settles.

1-0.

I get up, take the puck out of the net with my glove, and hand it to the linesman.

Nothing happens inside me. Nothing at all. I’ve been waiting eleven days to find out what happens. The answer is: a puck goes in the net, the scoreboard changes, my heart rate doesn’t move one beat. My glove hand is steady. So is the blocker. Beau comes past me on his way to the faceoff.

He doesn’t stop. He’s already turning to go up ice. He swings his stick down, taps my pads twice—right, left—the way he’s done four hundred times in six seasons. He says, “Nothing. Next one,” and he’s gone.

The faceoff goes. Play goes down the other end.

At 7:30, there’s a stoppage for icing and our defenseman comes back to the crease.

He’s twenty-five. He’s been in the league two years and he’s one of the reasons we’re in a playoff position. He skates in, stops with one hand on top of the net, and pulls his mouthguard out with two fingers.

“That’s on me,” he says. “I was standing in your kitchen. I saw him load, and I stayed in it. That’s on me. That’s a hundred percent me.”

I’m looking at the far blue line.

“Doyle.” He knocks his stick against my pad, once. “Hey. That’s on me.”