"Soucy says he cheats his glove."
"He does. Had him at the Worlds. Cheats glove, bites on the fake. Tell our guys to look him off and shoot late." He watches the ice a second. "You sleep?"
"Like a baby. Hotel bed, lights out early."
"Hmm." A beat then a nod. "You look good."
"I am good."
He doesn't answer that, which from Tikh is a full paragraph. He gets up to take his reps.
On the ice, the goalie coach runs the warm-up sequence. Shots from the dots. Lateral pushes. The work that wakes a body up. Somewhere in it, the cold stops mattering. Marchetti comes down my wing on the flow drill, and I have the words before I have the save.
"You're going far pad. You always go far pad on a clean entry. Show me something I haven't seen."
He goes far pad. I take it off the toe.
"That's not new."
"Next one's new,” he says skating around the net.
"It won't be." Next rep, he tries glove and I get a piece. "Closer."
I tap Gertie and Quessa going into the blue paint, glove then blocker, because they like it. At some point this winter, I stopped doing it to humor a teammate and started doing it because the posts have names the same way the rookies have names, the same way anything does once you've stood beside it long enough. Soucy named them in September. Wrote nothing down. Assumed I'd remember. I did.
At the bench between drills, I catch it. Soucy's water bottle is squared on the boards with the label out, and I'm the one who squared it, and I don't remember deciding to. I notice it the way you notice your own heartbeat once and then can't unhear it for a stretch. I moved Berger's bag and gave the clean corner to a guy who'd never ask for it and felt like I won a hand. I felt nothing handing myself the rattling vent. Berger's own bottle is sweating onto the bench eight feet off and I have no plans for it at all.
I hold onto the notes. The way his hands go at two speeds, the pattern fast or slow, and everything it tells me. The way the roomadjusts around him without being asked. I don't know what else to do with it, so I keep it.
The vent rattles. There's a Game 2 to steal tonight in a building that sold every seat to watch us leave quietly.
The team filters off the ice in twos and threes. The goalie coach gives us the net ten more minutes and then goes too, because goalies are their own country and he learned in October to let us govern it. Soucy stays at his end. I stay at mine. We trade soft shots back and forth, work done, not ready for the tunnel.
"You're staying late," Soucy says, gloving one of my floaters out of the air.
"So are you."
"I'm always late. You've got a room and a nap and a guy who texts you a meditation link."
"My mother sends me one good link a week and I'm not apologizing for it." I push another puck down the ice to him. "I like it out here when it's empty. Quietest a rink ever gets."
"That's the only time you stop talking."
"I don't talk that much."
"You said four full sentences to a goalpost an hour ago."
"She earned them. She's been taking nineteen's shot and not complaining once."
He sends the puck back. I let it come, and slide it down again, and we keep it going a while, the soft easy rhythm of two people with nowhere to be for ten minutes.
"Tonight," I say. "If they get one early, what do you want from me?"
"If they get one early, you play the next save and not the last goal. That's the whole thing. You sit there chewing on the one that went in, you give up the next two. The puck's already in the net. The net doesn't care how you feel about it." He gloves my shot, holds it a second, sends it back. "Play the save in front of you."
"You've thought about this for me."
"I've thought about it for every goalie I've ever watched. You happen to be the one in the net."