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They wait.

“I wanted to, which was stupid,” I say. “I knew who was in the building. My coach told me after that I handed you a pen. He was right.”

“And what happens,” says a man at the far end, older with a gray mustache, who hasn’t said anything yet, “when you’re angry now?”

I think about it.

I think about sitting in my car outside a house on Christmas with my hand on the door handle, knowing damn well how Thanksgiving went. But I kept my word.

“I’m learning to wait,” I say. “Before I do anything. I’m not great at it yet. But I’m better than I was in October.”

“What changed in October?”

“A lot of things,” I say.

The mustache looks at me for a long time. Then he writes something down. I don’t know what.

At the end, Morley closes the folder.

“Last one,” he says. “What do you want? From your career. Not where you think you’ll go. What you want.”

With fifteen men looking at me, I don’t think about what my dad wants or what he’d want me to say, which I know, word for word.

I think about a garage. A tarp with holes cut in it. A hundred thousand shots.

“I want to wake up every day and dedicate myself. Take the thousand shots and make the one that matters. And repeat. I want to be good. I want to be the guy who’s already where the puck’s going before anybody else sees it. I want to be that guy for an entire career.”

I stop.

“And I want to like it. I love the hell out of hockey. I don’t see myself doing anything else.”

Nobody says anything.

Then Morley stands up, comes around the table, and shakes my hand.

There are eleven more rooms. Over three days. Some of them ask the same things. Some of them ask weird things. One of them asks me what I’d do if I found out a teammate was cheating on his girlfriend. One asks me to name every player on their current roster, and I get fourteen, and they look disappointed. One asks me who I’d want to have dinner with, living or dead, and I say my grandfather, who I never met, which is true, and I didn’t know I was going to say until it was out.

Every one of them asks about March. Every time, I tell them the same thing.

By the third day, I can feel Sato beside me not tensing up anymore when they ask.

On Friday, they make us ride the bike.

That’s what everybody talks about. All week in the lobby at the card tables, kids from Saskatchewan telling kids from Sweden about the bike like it’s a ghost story. Thirty seconds, all out, against so much resistance your legs turn to concrete halfway through. That’s the Wingate. The day before, they did the VO2 test, where they ramp the bike until your lungs feel like they’re coming apart and watch how long you can keep going.

I lie on the floor of a convention center in Buffalo afterward with my cheek on the cold carpet and my legs shaking and think, for some reason, of a garage door with a dent in it from the pucks, and my mom turning on the floodlight.

I call Tess every night from the hotel room on my back on the bed with the TV on mute. I call her on FaceTime. She’s usually working at the blue desk in her new bedroom. She props me up against her laptop and keeps taping mailers while I tell her about the rooms.

She laughs at the roster question. She makes me tell her which fourteen I got. She tells me the fifteenth was probably the backup goalie, everybody forgets the backup goalie, and she’s right. She tells me a video of hers got sixty thousand views on Tuesday. She says it like it’s nothing.

“Influencer,” I say.

“I will end you.”

On Wednesday night, I tell her about Morley. What happens when you’re angry now? And what I said. I’m better than I was in October.

She stops taping. She looks at the camera.