"Four is good," he agreed.
The playoffs arrived the way all inevitable things arrive, with a mix of anticipation and dread that settled over the team like weather. We were in the wild card race with three games left in the regular season. Two wins would clinch. One loss in the wrong place and we were done.
The locker room was tense. Not fractured, not dysfunctional, but tense in the way a rubber band is tense when stretched to its useful limit. Every player understood the stakes. Every practice was sharper. Every film session was longer. Coach Callahan had stopped making jokes, which was how you knew things were serious, because Callahan's jokes were rare enough in normal times that their absence registered like a change in atmospheric pressure.
I played the best hockey of my career. This is not ego. This is data. Over the final three games of the regular season, my defensive metrics were elite by every measure. Corsi, expected goals against, zone exits, controlled entries. The spreadsheet was clean. The numbers were beautiful. And for the first time, the numbers and the feeling matched. I was not playing well becauseI was compensating or controlling or hiding. I was playing well because I was whole.
Cole was playing well too, but differently than before. There was an easiness to his game now that had not been there in October. He was not performing for anyone. Not his father, not the team, not the scouts, not me. He was just playing hockey, and the purity of it was visible in every shift. Free of the weight he'd been carrying, his talent was undiluted.
The team felt it. When your two best players are unlocked, the confidence spreads. Jonah was centering the top line with a quiet intensity that belied his usual easygoing nature. Wes Chen had been moved from the enforcer role to a regular shift and was producing in ways that surprised everyone except those of us who had always seen the hockey player underneath the fighter. Even the rookies were playing above their heads, buoyed by the energy of a team that believed.
The clinching game was at home against Columbus. A Thursday night. The arena was sold out for the first time all season. Seventeen thousand eight hundred people who had bought tickets to watch an expansion team try to do something that nobody outside the locker room thought was possible three years ago.
I will not describe the game in detail because the game is not the point. What is the point is this: with four minutes left in the third period, up 3-2, Columbus pulled their goalie for an extra attacker. Six against five. The longest four minutes of the season.
Every shift was survival. Block shots. Clear pucks. Win faceoffs. The noise in the arena was so loud that I could not hear Cole when he called for the puck, so I found him by feel. The same way I always found him. The current in the water. The frequency that only we could hear.
With forty-seven seconds left, Columbus turned the puck over in our zone. Jonah picked it up behind our net and hit mewith a pass at the hash marks. I looked up. Empty net at the other end. Two hundred feet of open ice between me and the most satisfying goal of my career.
I shot. The puck traveled the length of the ice in what felt like slow motion and slid into the empty net, and the arena made a sound that I will hear in my memory for the rest of my life. Not a cheer. A release. Seventeen thousand people exhaling at the same time, the collective breath of a city that had just watched its hockey team become legitimate.
The final buzzer sounded twelve seconds later. 4-2. Atlanta Reapers, playoff bound.
The team poured over the boards. Bodies everywhere. Helmets flying. Sticks raised. I was buried in a pile of teammates who were screaming and laughing and spraying water, and somewhere in the chaos I felt a hand grip the back of my jersey and pull me sideways, and then Cole's face was in front of mine, red and sweating and grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.
"We did it," he said.
"We did it."
He pulled me into a hug. A team hug, surrounded by twenty other men doing the same thing. Nothing suspicious. Nothing exposed. Just two teammates embracing in a pile of joy.
But his mouth was next to my ear, and he whispered something that nobody else could hear.
"I love you."
Three words. In English. Not whispered against my skin in the dark of a bedroom or murmured into my hair on a couch at 2 AM. Said in an arena, in a pile of hockey players, at full volume inside a whisper. The most public private thing he had ever done.
I pulled back just enough to look at him. His eyes were bright. Not with tears. With certainty. The same certainty hebrought to every pass, every shot, every decision on the ice. Cole Briggs did not say things he didn't mean.
I wanted to say it back. In English, in Russian, in every language that had ever been invented to describe the way one person could become the center of another person's gravity. But there were cameras and microphones and seventeen thousand witnesses, and I was not ready. Not yet.
So I said, "Good empty-netter, Briggs."
And he laughed, because he heard what I meant underneath what I said, the way he always did, the way he had since the first time we sat next to each other in a film room and he whispered commentary that changed my understanding of what proximity could mean.
In the locker room, the celebration continued. Music, champagne that someone had smuggled in, Coach Callahan standing in the corner pretending to be annoyed while clearly fighting a smile. Jonah was giving an impromptu speech that nobody had asked for and everyone was enjoying. Wes was sitting in his stall with a quiet grin, the most emotion I had ever seen on his face, and Luca the equipment manager was handing out towels and beaming like a small Italian sun.
I sat at my stall and let the noise wash over me. Not hiding inside it. Just existing within it. Part of the sound instead of separate from it.
My phone buzzed. Katya.
I watched on a stream. You scored the empty net goal. I screamed so loud the neighbors complained. I am very proud of you, Misha. Not for the goal. For everything else.
I read the message twice. Then I typed back: Thank you for telling me to stop being a monument.
She replied with a single emoji. A heart. Katya, who had opinions about everything and used words the way surgeons used scalpels, sent me a heart. It was enough.
I looked across the locker room. Cole was in the middle of the celebration, drenched in champagne, laughing at something Jonah had said. He caught my eye. The look lasted two seconds. The same two seconds as the wrist grip in Tampa. The same weight. The same message.