toes and looked over our heads at Soupy. “Swanny?” he said. Soupy slowly stood without raising his eyes and placed a glove on my outstretched forearm. Coach watched. Then he looked at the rest of us and said, “One game.”
“One game!” we yelled. Everyone but Soupy.
When one hockey team faces another that is clearly faster and more skilled, the job of the goalie on the lesser squad is to keep his team close until they catch a break that might shift the momentum in their favor. Keep your team within a goal, even two goals, and they play with the proper balance of patience and urgency needed to come back. Get behind by three and despair begins to take over. You start playing stupid. Then it’s over. In hockey there is no better match for superior speed and skill than a hot goalie.
I was never hotter than during the first two periods of that state title game.
The Pipefitters won the opening face-off and flung the puck hard into the corner to my left. While two Fitters gave chase, Soupy tried to rifle the puck around the boards behind the net. But one of the Fitters slapped it out of the air and the next thing I knew it had bounced out in front of me and onto the stick of Hooper, not fifteen feet away, all alone. His rising shot caught me on the left side of my neck, hitting me so hard that it popped my mask clear off my head. The puck deflected downward and pinged off the goalpost as I tumbled backward, grasping at the crossbar for balance, determined not to go down. The refs were whistling play dead, but Hooper skated up and deliberately banged into me. I saw his left eye up close, phlegmy and gray as the innards of a clam. He wanted me to see it. “Fuck off,” I said, pushing him away. He laughed and kicked my mask aside. Then Soupy and Teddy and Wilf and two other Fitters converged, shoving and swearing as the refs pulled us apart. When we’d separated and I leaned over to pick up my mask, Soupy turned to Boynton and punched him once, hard, in the chest, nearly toppling him right there in front of all the Pipefitters and the Rats and the fans standing three deep along the glass. “Where the fuck were you?” Soupy said, and I heard Hooper laughing again as Teddy turned and skated to his position. “Guys, what the hell?” I shouted. My neck was burning and my butterflies were gone.
For the next fourteen minutes, it seemed like the Pipefitters never left our zone. It was as if they had ten skaters to our five, as if there were an invisible wall at our blue line that kept the puck from going to the other end of the ice. I scuttled furiously back and forth between the goalposts, trying to stay square and upright between the puck and my net as the Fitters relentlessly circled, quick as bumblebees, the puck flashing from one Fitter’s stick to another, corner to slot to point to dot, behind me, in front of me, and back again and again and again. The shots came from everywhere, two and three at a time. I kicked them into the corners. I snatched them from the air. I deflected them off my shoulders, chest, Eggo, mask. Whenever I could, I gathered the puck into my chest or my glove to freeze it for a face-off so we could get fresh legs on the ice. The Rats were gasping for air.
Teddy got better at staying with Hooper, but it didn’t matter much because that just left their four players against our four, and almost all of theirs, skater for skater, were better. Part of our problem was Soupy. He was as good as any of the Fitters, even Hooper, but he wasn’t playing his game. He wasn’t controlling the puck and leading the charge out of our zone. He was hanging back. Coach Blackburn knew. I saw him glower when Soupy went to the bench. I saw Soupy ignore him.
With two minutes to go in the period, the Fitters’ enormous defenseman, the aptly named Wallman, stepped between Teddy and Hooper and suddenly Hooper was free. Someone got Hooper the puck and he faked out the last man, Zilchy, as if his skates were tied together. Now it was just Hooper and me. I slid forward to cut down the angle, hearing the crescendo roar of the crowd even as I heard Coach in my head: “Hold your ground.” Hooper dropped his left shoulder to fake a shot. I felt my right knee buckle. I slid to my left as Hooper dug his blades into the ice and cut in the same direction. In a flash the puck was on his backhand. It was just how I’d seen him deke the other goalies. Like them, I wanted to go down, my legs wanted to, my body wanted to. Hooper flicked the puck at my right shoulder. My knees were giving way, my butt was dropping, and momentum was taking me to my left, away from the puck, when I flung out my right hand, the one inside Eggo. As I fell to the ice, the puck just barely caught the edge of the waffle and skipped higher. I craned my neck to look back as I sprawled and saw the puck-or maybe I just heard it-clang off the crossbar and fly up and over the glass behind the net. Whistles shrieked. I jumped to my feet. I’d gotten away with a flop, a sloppy one at that. The crowd began to chant: “Gus! Gus! Gus!” Hooper spun on his skates and stopped, looking straight at me. Our eyes met. He grinned and winked his good eye. I looked away.
Finally, we caught that break. Wallman crushed Jeff Champagne against the boards on my left as Champy tried to scoop the puck out of our zone. But Wallman’s stick blade snagged in a seam of the boards and snapped off. He dropped the broken stick and tried to kick the puck as Champy fell to a knee, poked it past him, jumped up, and wheeled around him on a breakaway. The poor Fitter goalie must have been cold; he hadn’t seen a shot in ten minutes. He flopped, of course. Champy waited till he was down, then fired a shot over his right shoulder. As the goal light flashed red, I raced out of my net to the blue line with my stick raised in celebration. I couldn’t believe it. The Fitters had put twenty-two shots on net to our two. But we led, 1–0.
The lead held well into the third and final period. The Rat Trap really took over then, taking the edge off the Fitters’ offensive game. Their passes went awry, the open man wasn’t so easy to find as he was in the first period. Within our zone, Coach drew us into a defense designed to jam the front of our net and force the Fitters to take low-percentage shots from the perimeter.
The clock wound down-ten minutes to go, seven, five. The Fitters were gasping now, and growing frustrated. They seemed astonished that they could be losing to our team. With three minutes and sixteen seconds to go, their astonishment turned to exasperation-one of them took a cross-checking penalty. Their coach nearly vaulted the boards to assail the referee. Now the Fitters were playing stupid. We’d have a one-man advantage for two minutes. In the stands, our fans began to celebrate. The state title was within reach. All we had to do was keep the puck out of our net.
I don’t know why Teddy Boynton chose that moment to leave Hooper alone and chase a loose puck in the Fitter zone. Hooper was as tired as the rest of his teammates. He hadn’t had a clean shot on me since that breakaway I had barely stopped. Maybe Teddy thought, with the one-man advantage, he could take a chance on scoring the goal that would put the game and the championship away. But when he abandoned Hooper in pursuit of the open puck, he left five strides between himself and his man. I heard Coach scream, “Tiger-no!” As Teddy reached the puck, Wallman snuck up on his blind side and flattened him. The Rats fans howled for a penalty. Wallman whacked the puck off the glass and it slid to Hooper in full stride. “Tiger, get up!” Coach yelled. But Hooper was gone.
Teddy’s gamble left the rest of the Rats flat-footed. Soupy gave futile chase from the opposite side of the rink as Hooper swooped in from my right. I pushed out. He wound up. I never saw the puck. I heard three distinct sounds, barely a second apart. First was the thunderous thwack of wood on rubber. Then the sickening ring of the puck inside the juncture of the goalpost and the crossbar. Then the roar of the Fitter fans. As Hooper whipped past me, his stick raised high over his head, he looked over and again winked his good eye. “Can’t see it, can’t stop it,” he said.
I felt a hand grab me by the back of my jersey. It was Soupy, red-faced and furious. “Fucking Blackburn,” he sputtered, his spittle flecking the skin behind my mask. “I knew this would fucking happen.”
“Forget it, Soup,” I said. “We’re going to win.”
“You don’t understand,” Soupy said. Past him I could see Blackburn and Leo calling out from the bench, Zilchy and Wilf skating over. “Blackburn fucked us, Trap.”
“Calm down, Soupy.”
“Like fuck,” Soupy said. He turned to skate away and then, as Zilchy and Wilf caught up to him, he wheeled around and yelled, “Watch. I’ll show these motherfuckers a fancy-ass fag move, all right.”
I knew immediately what he meant.
When it happened, we were five minutes into sudden-death overtime. We had just dumped the puck into the Fitter zone. Number 25 slapped it high on the glass around the back of the net and up the opposite boards. Champy stopped it with his chest and shoveled it back across the ice into the corner left of the Fitter net, where Soupy, having snuck in from his defensive post, now appeared. Two Fitters converged, but Soupy sidestepped one, then the other, cut left, and scooted behind the net. The two Fitter defensemen momentarily froze in front of their net. The goalie grabbed his crossbar and looked frantically over one shoulder, then the other, trying to anticipate which way Soupy would go. But I was the only one in the rink who knew what was about to happen, the only one in the theater who’d seen the movie before, who knew how it was going to end, who knew that Soupy, no matter how Coach had upset him, was going to be the hero.
