"That saucer pass," I say, because I have something to say about it and because saying it feels more natural than the silence that is the alternative. "The way you described hearing Park's movement. That's proprioception, right? Spatial awareness through non-visual input."
He stops walking. Turns. Looks at me.
"You know what proprioception is."
"I read a paper on it last year. Perceptual-motor coupling in elite athletes. The idea that high-level players process environmental information through channels that aren't visual. Some of them are auditory, some are kinesthetic. It's why great playmakers can make passes they shouldn't be able to see."
He stares at me. The stare is not the blank stare of the podium. It's the stare of a person who has just been spoken to in a language he didn't expect to encounter outside his own head.
"Nobody's ever asked me about that," he says. "The hearing thing. Coaches tell me I have great vision but it's not vision. It's something else. It's like the ice talks to me."
"That's a great line. Can I use it?"
He almost smiles. The almost is the important part. The corners of his mouth move, the muscles engage, the expression begins its formation, and then a secondary process intervenes(the filtering, the caution, the checkpoint) and the smile is arrested mid-assembly.
"Yeah," he says. "You can use it."
We talk. Three minutes. Not an interview. Not a source interaction. Two people standing in a hallway talking about proprioception and ice acoustics and the way a puck sounds different at different velocities and the way a goalie (Mars, specifically) can apparently track pucks by sound when the visual is screened.
Jamie is animated. His hands move. His voice has the cadence of a person who is enjoying the conversation, which is a cadence I have not heard from him before and which is distinct from his media cadence the way a live performance is distinct from a recording. There's a vitality in it. An aliveness.
Then he smiles. Not the almost-smile. A real one. Full. The checkpoint fails or is overridden or simply doesn't fire, and the smile arrives on his face unfiltered and unedited, and it changes his face entirely. The guardedness dissolves. The age drops. He looks, for one unguarded second, like a nineteen-year-old who is happy.
I notice the smile. I notice that I notice the smile. I notice that the noticing produces a response in my chest that is not the response of a journalist cataloguing a source's behavior but the response of a person seeing another person be, for one moment, uncomplicated and beautiful and free.
"I should go," I say, because I should.
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
"Good game tonight."
"Thanks." He pauses. "And thanks for the question. The proprioception one. It was a good question."
He walks away. I walk away. The hallway is empty again. The fluorescent lights hum their indifferent hum.
I get in my car. I sit behind the wheel. I do not start the engine for two minutes. The two minutes are not productive. The two minutes are a man sitting in a parking garage with his hands at ten and two and his journalist brain saying "that was a source interaction, nothing more" and another part of his brain, a part that does not wear glasses and does not carry a notebook and does not give a damn about professional ethics, saying "he smiled and the smile was real and you saw it and it mattered."
I start the car. I drive home. I write the game recap. The recap is professional and thorough and includes the proprioception quote, which is an excellent quote, and makes no mention of the smile.
The smile is not relevant to the game recap. The smile is not relevant to anything except the growing, inconvenient, professionally dangerous recognition that Jamie Kowalski is becoming a person to me and not just a source, and the distance between those two categories is the distance between a career and a catastrophe.
I close my laptop. I take off my glasses. I rub my eyes.
I put the glasses back on. The glasses don't help.
JAMIE
Mik Volkov has been teaching me without speaking.
The film sessions are our thing, though "our thing" implies a relationship that Mik would never acknowledge with language. What happens is this: the team watches film together in the video room, thirty men in chairs, Callahan at the front with a remote, pausing and rewinding and delivering observations with the conversational warmth of a man reading a tax document. When the team session ends, the room empties. Mik stays. I stay.
This was not arranged. There was no invitation. After the first team film session, I lingered because I wanted to rewatch a defensive zone sequence that confused me, and Mik lingered because Mik apparently lives in the film room the way other people live in their apartments. He saw me rewinding. He sat down two chairs away. He pointed at the screen.
The point was directed at the weak-side defenseman's positioning. The angle of the body, the gap between stick and skates, the half-second delay between the read and the reaction. Mik's finger, extended toward the screen, said everything that a twenty-minute coaching lecture would have said, and it said it in one gesture.
I adjusted the next day in practice. Callahan noticed. Callahan did not comment, because Callahan does not comment on things that are working. Callahan comments on things that are broken. The absence of comment was the compliment.
Since then, the film room sessions have become a routine. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. After the team session. Mik stays. I stay. He points. I learn. The silence between us is not uncomfortable. It's functional. Two men watching hockey in the dark, one of them teaching and the other learning, and the medium of instruction is a single index finger directed at a screen.