Everything that mattered was in those two seconds. Everything that had ever mattered.
Two weeks until the playoffs. Two weeks until the world got bigger and louder and the cameras got closer and the stakes got higher than anything either of us had ever faced.
I was not afraid.
This was new. This was unprecedented. And it was the truth.
For the first time in my life, I was not afraid of what came next.
COLE
Game 7 is a different animal.
I've played in big games before. Playoff qualifiers, rivalry matches, the kind of regular season games that feel like more than they are because the standings are tight and the crowd is loud and every shift matters. But Game 7 of a first-round playoff series, at home, in front of a sold-out arena that has been losing its collective mind for three hours, is something else entirely. It is hockey distilled to its purest form. Win and advance. Lose and go home. Nothing in between.
We were tied 2-2 going into the third period. The Columbus Blue Jackets were a team that nobody had expected to push us this far, and they were playing like men who had read every prediction that said they'd lose in five and had taken it personally. Their forecheck was relentless. Their goalie was standing on his head. Every shift felt like the last thirty seconds of a boxing round where both fighters are exhausted and swinging on instinct.
Mik was playing like a man possessed. Not reckless. Mik was never reckless. But there was an intensity to his game that I hadn't seen before, a quality of absolute presence, as if every molecule in his body had agreed to be exactly here, exactly now,doing exactly this. His gap control was perfect. His stick was in every passing lane. He was making reads so far ahead of the play that it looked like he could see the future, and maybe he could, because Mikhail Volkov had spent his entire life preparing for things before they happened, and Game 7 was just another version of the same discipline.
I was exhausted. My legs were burning. I had a cut above my left eye from a high stick in the second period that the trainers had glued shut between periods, and the glue was pulling at my skin every time I blinked. My shoulder ached from a hit I'd taken along the boards in the first. None of it mattered. Pain is just information, and the information I was receiving was that my body was approaching its limit, which meant I had to be smarter with what was left.
The third period ended 2-2. Overtime.
In the locker room between periods, Coach Callahan stood in the center of the room and said nothing for a full thirty seconds. The silence was more effective than any speech. We all sat there, breathing, sweating, bleeding in some cases, and felt the weight of the moment settle on us like snow.
"You know what to do," Coach said.
That was it. Five words. We filed back to the tunnel.
In the corridor, walking toward the ice, Mik fell into step beside me. We didn't touch. We didn't need to. His presence at my shoulder was its own kind of contact. A frequency. A current.
"How's the eye?" he said.
"Glued shut. Very glamorous."
"You look like a pirate."
"A sexy pirate?"
"A pirate who needs to keep his head up in the neutral zone."
"That's less romantic."
"I am not trying to be romantic. I am trying to keep you alive for overtime."
"Same thing, coming from you."
We stepped onto the ice and the noise hit us like a physical force. Eighteen thousand people, on their feet, making a sound that was not quite a cheer and not quite a roar but something primal and desperate and full of the kind of hope that only sports can produce. The arena lights were blinding. The ice was fresh and clean and gleaming, and the sixty minutes of war that had been played on it were erased, and everything started new.
Overtime in the playoffs is sudden death. Next goal wins. There are no timeouts, no coach's challenges, no margin for error. You play until someone scores and then you either celebrate or you don't. The simplicity of it is terrifying.
The first five minutes were a stalemate. Both teams playing cautious, probing, neither willing to make the mistake that would end it. The pace was slower than regulation, which was deceptive because the intensity was higher. Every pass was calculated. Every shot was contested. Every whistle was a chance to breathe and a reminder that the breathing would stop when the puck dropped again.
I was on the ice for the seventh minute of overtime when it happened.
Columbus turned the puck over in the neutral zone. A bad pass, the kind of mistake that happens when legs are tired and brains are fried and the pressure of Game 7 overtime compresses your decision-making into a space too small for good choices. The puck squirted free. Jonah got to it first, because Jonah always got to loose pucks first, and he pushed it up the left wing with two quick strides.
I was ahead of him. I could feel the lane opening before I saw it, the way I always could with this team, with these players, with the specific neural network that we had built over a season of shared ice and shared purpose. I accelerated. Jonah saw me. The pass was perfect. I caught it at the top of the circle and theColumbus defense collapsed toward me because they had been watching me score goals all series and they were not going to let me beat them in overtime.