But the doing is different tonight. The press box, which has always been a sanctuary (the one place where the glasses and the notebook and the professional frame work perfectly, where the world is reducible to plays and stats and the clean geometry of hockey), feels smaller. The glass between me and the ice, whichis there to separate the observers from the participants, feels like the wrong kind of barrier. I've spent my career on this side of the glass and the this-side has always been enough. Tonight, for the first time, the this-side feels like a limitation rather than a position.
Jamie scores in the second period. A wrister from the slot, his fifth of the season. The bench erupts. I write the goal down in my notebook: "Kowalski, wrister, slot, 14:23 2nd." This is a professional notation. The professional notation does not include the fact that when the goal light went on, I felt a surge in my chest that was not the neutral, observational response of a journalist watching a source achieve a professional milestone. The surge was pride. Specific, personal, inappropriate pride.
I write the game recap after the final horn. The recap is clean. The writing is good. The Kowalski goal is the lead, because it was the game-winner, and the description of the goal is vivid and accurate and does not contain any words that a colleague would find unusual.
The words that a colleague would find unusual are in my head, not in the recap. The words are: he's getting better every game. The words are: his confidence is building and I can see it in his posture. The words are: someone should tell him that the thing he's carrying doesn't have to be carried alone.
These are not professional words. These are the words of a person who is falling for someone he covers and who is running out of ways to pretend he isn't.
I file the recap. I drive home. I check my phone.
Jamie responded. At 3:12 PM, thirty-five minutes after my text. Three words: "Not that easy."
Three words that I read and reread and that could mean anything (the feature process was more challenging than I'm giving it credit for, the transition to the NHL is harder than the article suggests) and that I know, in the part of me that theglasses can't protect, mean something specific. Not that easy. The "easy" was a lie and he called it. The "easy" was a wall and he saw through it the way he sees through everything, the way he saw through the recorder and the press conference and the hallway, because Jamie Kowalski is paying attention with the same supernatural focus that makes his skating electric and his passes impossible and his silence deafening.
I put the phone down. I take off my glasses. I hold them. The familiar weight in my hands.
I sit in my apartment with the books and the quiet and the growing, unavoidable recognition that the wall I built (press credential, notebook, professional distance, the glasses, the glasses, the goddamn glasses) is developing a crack, and the crack is shaped like a nineteen-year-old with blue eyes who types "not that easy" at 3:12 PM and means something that neither of us is ready to say.
The glasses are on the counter. The wall is optional. The crack is widening.
I go to bed. I do not sleep well.
JAMIE
The puck leaves my stick and I know before it reaches the net.
This is the thing about shooting. The good shots, the ones that are going in, have a different feeling at the release. The weight transfers cleanly through the wrists, the blade makes contact at the correct point on the puck, and the follow-through is automatic, the body completing the motion with the satisfied precision of a machine that has executed its design function perfectly. The puck rises off the ice, rotates, and travels to the upper corner of the net at a speed that the goalie cannot reach because the goalie committed to the blocker side a tenth of a second before the puck went glove side, and the decision that the goalie made was the decision I wanted him to make, and the wanting was the read, and the read was right.
The light goes on. The horn sounds. And eighteen thousand people in downtown Atlanta make a noise that enters my body through my chest and changes the chemical composition of my blood.
First NHL goal.
The bench explodes. Bodies pour over the boards. I am hit from three directions simultaneously by men who arelarger than me and moving faster than seems necessary for a celebration, and the impact drives me backward until I'm against the boards and the pile is five bodies deep and the noise is inside me and around me and everywhere.
Someone grabs me. In the pile. Arms around my shoulders, a full-body embrace, and the body against mine is warm and solid and the embrace lasts a beat longer than the others. Not by much. A half-second. A fraction of a fraction. But my body, which has been lying to me for nineteen years and which stopped lying three weeks ago in a hotel room in Philadelphia, responds to the half-second with a clarity that is not ambiguous.
Heat. Low. Immediate. The kind of response that is not intellectual and not emotional but purely, specifically, physically real.
I pull away. Not violently. Not noticeably. The pile is dissolving anyway, bodies peeling off and skating back to the bench, and my extraction is just part of the general dismantling. Nobody sees the pulling-away as different from the natural conclusion of the celebration.
I skate to the bench. I sit down. I stare at the ice. My heart rate is elevated and the elevation is not from the goal. The elevation is from the half-second. From the warmth of a body against mine and the response that the warmth produced and the absolute, terrifying certainty that the response was not a misfire. The response was a signal. A clean, unmistakable, 2,100-hertz signal (Mars would understand this metaphor) from a body that has finally started telling the truth.
The game continues. I play the third period on autopilot. My legs work. My hands work. The hockey brain does what the hockey brain does, which is process information and execute decisions at a speed that conscious thought cannot match. The other brain, the one that is currently replaying the half-second on a loop and analyzing the heat and the pulling-away and thesitting-on-the-bench-staring-at-the-ice, that brain is not doing well.
The horn sounds. We win 4-2. I have a goal and an assist and a plus-two and the locker room is happy and loud and someone sprays Gatorade and Jonah is attempting to start a chant and the chant is my name, which is mortifying and wonderful and I am smiling because I scored my first NHL goal and I am dying inside because of what happened after.
The press conference. The podium. The lights. Twenty reporters and cameras and the full machinery.
Declan is in the third row. Glasses on. Notebook open. Professional.
"First NHL goal," he says. "Walk us through what was going through your mind."
What was going through my mind was: the puck is going in. What was going through my mind after was: someone hugged me and my body responded in a way that I can no longer pretend is about anything other than what it is. What was going through my mind on the bench was: the walls are optional and the walls are cracking and the crack is getting bigger and I don't know how to fix it and I don't know if I want to fix it.
"Relief, mostly," I say. "You work your whole life for a moment like that and when it happens, the first feeling isn't joy. It's relief. Like, okay, I did it. The wait is over."
This is a good answer. Media-trained. Emotionally resonant without being revealing. The kind of answer that makes the highlight reel and the tweet roundup.