Page 96 of Knottingley Ever After
He shoots.
Top corner. Glove side. The shot he has been making for three seasons. The shot Saint Aldwin came out of regulation prepared to bury into the back of my net.
I move my glove. I do not lunge. I do not stretch. I simply put my catching mitt in the place that the puck was going to be a sixteenth of a second before it got there, and the puck disappears, with a soft satisfyingthwack,into the leather web of my glove.
Time stops.
Just for a beat. Just for the beat where the entire Whitfield Arena registers that the goalie has, in the most quiet undramatic way available to her, robbed the star forward of Saint Aldwin in overtime on the first night of the season.
Then time un-stops.
Whistle. The puck is mine. The break is over. The rush dies in the corner.
Five seconds later Matteo wins the puck off the wall, feeds Rémi at the line. Rémi swings it back to Jude. Jude carries through center, drops it back to a streaking Matteo at the high slot, and Matteo — because he is Matteo — buries the overtimewinner in the top corner on a wrist shot the Saint Aldwin goalie does not even get a glove on.
Final score: two-one. Wolves.
Final save: the puck is still in my catching mitt.
The Whitfield Arena erupts.
Not the way the arena erupts for a normal exhibition winner. The way it erupts when the room has been silently rooting, throughout, for an outcome it had not believed it would actually get. Section nine is on its feet. The older women in the matching scarves directly behind our bench are clapping each other on the back. The Omega bench, which I have been pretending I am not aware of all night, has come out of its seats in a wave I can hear from the crease.
And the JumboTron lights up.
It catches, in the camera-finding sweep of a director who has clearly been waiting for the moment all night, an Omega in section nine who is mid-clap, the camera operator having cut directly to her face the way camera operators cut to faces that read.
She is maybe nineteen.
Her hair is a wild deliberate explosion of color — black at the roots, purple through the lengths, an electric streak of blue at the temple, a sliver of pastel green tucked behind one ear. Round wire-rim glasses. A North Star jersey two sizes too large. Cheap glitter eye makeup. A small handmade pin on her chest I am too far away to read.
And her face, on the big screen, lit up by the moment she has not yet realized she is on — her face is the entire reason I do this.
She is beaming. She is clapping in a way her wrists cannot quite keep up with. Her eyes are the largest part of her face, and they are doing the precise twinkle of hope that I, an old jaded goalie who has spent five years carefully not believing in things, have not seen on another Omega’s face in years.
Oh.
Oh, sweetheart.
Something in my chest does something inconvenient. I drop my mask back over my face to hide what is almost certainly happening to my eyes, and tap my pipes twice in the small private ritual I run at the end of every game I have ever won.
Then he is there.
Jude has, in the small chaotic flood of his teammates pouring off the bench, beaten the lot of them to me. He hits the brakes in front of my crease with a perfect skidding stop that throws a clean wave of ice shavings against the front of my pads, gloves already off, both hands coming up to lift my cage cover before any of the rest can get close enough to tackle me into the back of my own net.
He looks at me.
Properly. Whole-face. The captain mask gone for half a second.
“O’Shea.”
“Kavanagh.”
“That,” he says, very evenly, with the cleaved-out precision of a captain delivering the highest praise he is professionally permitted to deliver, “was the best set of saves I have witnessed at this level in a long. Ass. Time.”
I beam.
I cannot help it. Inside my mask, behind the cage, with at least three thousand pairs of eyes on us, my face does the giddy traitor thing, and Jude, with his hands still on the lifted front of my mask, sees it land, and the corner of his own mouth lifts the way it does when he is letting me have a real one.
