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Chapter Eleven

An Article in The Players’ Voice “You’ll Always Be a Goalie” Aiden Campbell Retired Major League August 7, 2030

The eternal question: do people who are like that become goalies, or does being a goalie make people like that ?

I think a lot of people would probably say that I never even had a chance. First of all, I’m Canadian. Second of all, my dad played professional hockey for a time. Third of all...well, I guess you could say I’m like that .

Some of my fondest memories as a child are watching games with my dad and my younger sister. My mom, who isn’t Canadian and is always busy, wasn’t usually around for that. So that was our special time with him, and I think he loved it as much as we did. I learned the game from him, on our beat-up couch in Winnipeg.

Hannah always loved watching the defensemen, but for me? It was always the goalies. One of my earliest memories is watching Jeremy Brown—the Falcons’ goalie at the time—diving to make a desperation save and thinking: I want to do that when I grow up. In fact, I loved watching the goalies so much that I broke Dad’s heart when I forsook the hometown Falcons and became a Royal fan, just because of Brendan Carrier. But who could blame me? When you watched a goalie like him, it wasn’t like watching sports. It was like watching a dance or an artist painting.

From the moment I saw Brendan Carrier play, I didn’t just know I wanted to be a goalie. I knew I was going to be a goalie.

I’m not going to tell you about the years of hard work, about getting drafted and making the team, about the awards and the Cups and all of the rest of it. Everyone knows that stuff. What I’m going to tell you about is how being a goalie became me , my whole identity, to the exclusion of almost anything else. And I embraced it. And I welcomed it.

I’ve always been a little...different, I think, from other people. And being a goalie really helped with that. Suddenly I had something to channel my focus into. Suddenly, the fact that I was kind of a weird, awkward kid didn’t matter. It was a feature, rather than a bug.

It’s something they don’t tell you when you start playing hockey. How easy it is to make it your personality, to focus only on the moment, to develop a kind of intense tunnel vision about your career and your role that makes the rest of your life seem secondary and almost unreal. It feels natural and right in the moment. It feels like the way things should be. Why worry about anything when you can play hockey, when you can stop pucks in front of twenty thousand fans every night, when you can feel that thrill? Why think about the future?

It’s great until it’s not. Because I only ever thought about hockey, I almost lost the most important thing, twice over.

So it went like this. I was twenty-two years old when I met the love of my life, although I didn’t know that’s who he was at the time. I saw, really saw , Matt Safaryan for the first time in the handshake line after the Libs beat the Royal in a hard-fought playoff series, and at the time I was mostly annoyed by him because he kept scoring on me.

The rest of the story is mine, but what you need to know is: I fucked everything up so, so bad, because I couldn’t see how a life with Matt was compatible with hockey. And at the time, I couldn’t even begin to separate myself from playing. Losing Matt destroyed me, but it was the safer option.

When I retired, it felt a little like dying. When I wasn’t playing hockey, I had no idea who I even was. Without hockey I felt like...nobody. Like less than a person. And when I started to figure it out, I still didn’t like the answer. It turned out that Aiden Campbell without hockey was sad, lonely, and didn’t know what the hell to do with himself. It was during that time—floundering around for any kind of a lifeline—that Matt fell into my life again.

How many of us get second chances? I almost couldn’t believe it. Here I was, with an opportunity I’d only ever dreamed of in my arms. But it turns out that even when you reconnect with an ex you never fell out of love with, if you don’t have your own shit together, it doesn’t matter. You’re just going to end up sabotaging that, too. And that’s exactly what I did.

This is what younger players coming up need to understand: you need to build a framework for your life outside of the sport. As easy as it is to construct your whole identity around being a goalie, you can’t do that. It’s safer at the time to wear those pads like armor, to refuse to look beyond the mask. But you can’t do that, because one day your body is going to give up on you, or your team is going to trade your contract, and then you’ll end up like I was: ruining the best thing that ever happened to you for a second time because you were too fucked up in the head to see how goddamn lucky you were.

How many of us get multiple second chances? I’m pretty sure I’m the luckiest man in the world, because I’ve fucked things up so badly, and I’m still here at the end of things, with him. Because he’s loving and brave and forgiving and he understood that even though I couldn’t be better at that time, I had desperately wanted to. Because he picked me up off of his front stoop in the middle of January and warmed my hands and my heart and asked me to stay with him.

And I said yes .

And since then, I’ve been saying yes to a lot of things. Yes to actually trying to implement what I’ve learned in therapy, yes to SSRIs, yes to going back to school for a business degree. Yes to refusing to view my retirement as an ending and yes to starting to reframe it as the beginning of the next phase of my life. Yes to being a better partner. Yes to staying in Montreal with Matt, and yes to opening a thriving hockey clinic with him.

I might not be a major league goalie anymore, but what I’ve learned since my retirement is that I’ll always be a goalie. It just might look a little different now. I might not be playing in front of twenty thousand fans anymore, but I’m teaching kids how to guard the net, and I’m trying to teach them, too, healthier and better ways to look at the game. I spent a lot of years existing only in the moment to the exclusion of the past and the future, and that almost destroyed my life. It’s been so damn rewarding to be able to talk to the kids who will be playing the game in the future. To hope that one day, they’ll be able to avoid my pitfalls.

What’s next for me? I have no idea.

I haven’t told Matt yet, but I’ve started a feasibility study to see whether we might be able to purchase our own dedicated rink for the clinic in a few years. It’s been growing by leaps and bounds, and I think maybe that’s the next step. I can already hear what Matt would say: “You don’t think this is a potentially terrible idea that could end in disaster?” And I already know how I’d respond: “When has that ever stopped us, Matty?”

And that’s the beautiful thing. I’m not worried about the rink. I’m not worried about the possibility of actually making it happen. I’m not worried about the feasibility. If it works out, it’s going to be amazing. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I’ll move on to the next thing.

Because that’s the thing: I have the rest of my life to figure it out. It’s taken me years to get there, but that’s the truth.

The rest of my life. And I can’t wait.

— Aiden