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FIFTY-FOUR

Clay

We lose game five in front of Jethro’s family, my sister and her boyfriend, and a packed Carolina crowd. Simply put, my guys succumb to the pressure of the moment. They went into the first face-off looking rattled. Carolina scored first, and our guys never recovered.

Jethro, to his credit, didn’t get rattled until the third period. He held the score to a 2-2 tie until the last ten minutes of the game when he let in two flying saucers.

The series is 3-2 now. We’re still up. We can still close the deal with a single win. But we’re no longer on a roll.

Over the next seventy-two hours, I give more renditions of my “Shake it Off” speech than you’d hear at a Taylor Swift concert. “Let’s do this at home, boys! Let’s close the deal in our own barn, in front of our own fans. It’ll only be harder if we take this thing to game seven.”

And so on.

My sister and Raul fly to Colorado and set up camp in my guest room, which means I don’t see Jethro privately at all for a couple nights. I’m probably too busy, anyway. The only time I take a break from hockey is to visit Pierre at his new Denver rehab facility and assure him that the team doesn’t hate him.

“We’re going to win this thing. You watch,” I tell him.

It’s all bluster. Suddenly it’s game night again, and I don’t feel ready. Surely I could have worked a little harder. Run through a few more plays. Analyzed a little more tape.

There’s no way to stop time. Stacks of news trucks park outside the arena again, I’m down to my last clean dress shirt, and there’s a stain on my lucky tie.

Is this what greatness looks like? I ask myself in the mirror in the arena’s restroom.

It will have to do.

I make another nervous lap past the stretching mats, and then through the trainers’ room, where Jethro is having his ankle taped. “Something wrong with your ankle?” I bark.

Both the trainer and Jethro look up at me with pitying glances. “Nothing new, Coach,” Kevin Tang says. “Just his usual soreness, magnified somewhat by all the action he’s seeing.”

“But I like action,” Jethro says with a teasing lilt. “Planning on a clean sheet tonight, boss.”

I give him a glare that implies I’m too strung out to be thinking about anything but hockey.

“Coach? A word?”

I whirl to find Tate standing there, a frown on his face. My chest goes tight because the PR guy wouldn’t interrupt me before a game if it weren’t important. “Sure,” I say a beat too late. “In my office.”

The fifty-pace walk into my little office seems to take all year. What could the issue be? A breaking story about…?

I start to sweat as I close the door. “What’s the issue?”

“A journalist is asking for quotes on an obnoxious little piece he’s running.”

Suddenly I’m lightheaded.