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He keeps finding empty ice.

Sully catches me at the bench after I send Mack through another lane.

“Keep that angle.”

“I invented it.”

“You invented getting old too?”

“Patent pending.”

Two minutes left. Tie game.

The building is one continuous sound.

Offensive-zone draw.

Their center crowds my right again.

He has learned nothing in two and a half hours. Some men come to the rink to compete and some come to find out whether they’re still the thing they were at nineteen, and this one has spent the whole night asking me the question and not enjoying the answer.

“Thought you’d stopped fighting me.”

“I stopped doing it your way.”

Puck drops.

He drives right.

I step left, trap his stick with mine, and kick the puck backward between my skates.

Mack gets it clean.

I pivot into the slot and take their center with me. Mack waits until the defender commits, then sends it across.

Roman is already there.

Shot.

Net.

The place detonates.

Roman disappears under three bodies at the glass. I get there last and hit the pile hard enough to move all of them.

“History,” Roman yells from somewhere underneath.

“Shut up,” four of us say at once.

I’m the best player on this ice. I’ve been the best player on most ice I’ve stood on since I was seventeen. Both of those goals were mine from the blue line, and Roman gets his name beside them because that’s how the sheet works and because I put the puck in the one place on the rink where even he couldn’t ruin it.

I will never say that to anybody.

I think it every single time.

We close out the last ninety seconds.

Stampede, three two.