*
Peter loses his bearings after the final whistle; one moment he’s bellowing in an embrace, the next he’s tumbling headfirst down an entire section of the stands, and gets to his feet with his ears ringing from all the people shrieking in and around them. Old people, young people, people who love this game, and people who don’t even care. He has no idea how it happened, but all of a sudden he finds himself in the middle of a wild, singing embrace with a stranger, and when he looks up he realizes that the man he’s dancing with on the steps is Robbie Holts. They stop and look at each other, then start laughing and can’t stop. For this one evening they’re seventeen years old again.
*
Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all.
But what the hell else is life made of?
19
Adrenaline does strange things to the body. When the final signal sounds, it makes moms and dads jump over the boards, respected entrepreneurs and factory managers slide around on the ice on slippery shoes, hugging each other like overtired toddlers in diapers. When Kevin drapes himself and Benji in a huge green flag and starts skating a lap of honor, the stands are already pretty much empty. The rink has filled up with the entire community. Everywhere people are jumping, slipping, tumbling, laughing, celebrating, crying. Childhood friends, classmates, parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors. How long will the town remember this? Only forever.
*
When you lose in hockey it feels like having your heart scalded. When you win, you own the clouds. Beartown is a heavenly town this evening.
*
Peter stops by the boards in one corner. He sits down alone on the ice and just laughs. All those hours in the office, all the arguments, the sleepless nights and angst-ridden mornings, they’re all worth it now, every last one of them. He’s still sitting there when the rest of the town, one inhabitant at a time, leaves the ice. Robbie Holts comes and sits down next to him. They just grin.
Adrenaline does strange things, especially when it leaves you. When he was a player, Peter kept getting told how important it was to “control your adrenaline,” but he never understood that. For him, his complete, unquestioned focus and concentration out on the ice, his ability to live absolutely in the moment, came quite naturally. It was only when he had to watch a game from the stands for the first time that he realized how close adrenaline is to panic. What rouses the body to battle and achievement are the same instincts that instill mortal dread in the brain.
During his career as a player Peter used to think of the final signal at the end of a game as a roller coaster that’s come to a halt: Some people think, “Good, that’s over.” And some think, “Again!” His first wish after every game was always to be allowed to play another one. Now, as GM, he needs migraine pills just to be able to function normally afterward.
When the last supporters, parents, and sponsors, delirious with victory, finally leave the rink over an hour later and spill out across the parking lot, chanting, “WE ARE THE BEARS, WE ARE THE BEARS, WE ARE THE BEARS, THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!” Peter, Robbie, and their memories stay behind.
“Do you want to come up to the office?” Peter asks, and Robbie bursts out laughing.
“Bloody hell, Peter, this is our first date—I’m not that kind of girl!”
Peter laughs too.
“Sure? We can have some tea and look at old team photos?”
Robbie holds out his hand.
“Say hi to your lads from me, okay? Tell them a proud old soldier was here watching them this evening.”
Peter squeezes his hand.
“Drop around for dinner one evening. Kira would love to see you too.”
“Sure!” Robbie lies, and they both know it.
They part. We only get moments.
*
The locker room is empty. After the adrenaline, after the singing and dancing and jumping on benches and banging on walls, after having just been packed with young and old men alike with bare chests and beer in their hair, it’s now numbingly silent. Amat is the only one left, he’s going around picking up scraps of tape from the floor. Peter walks down the corridor and stops in surprise.
“What are you still doing here, Amat?”
The boy reddens.
“Don’t say anything okay? About me doing a bit of tidying up? I just want to deal with the worst of it.”
Peter’s throat starts to tighten with shame. He remembers when he used to see the boy collect empty cans from the stand so that Fatima could afford to buy hockey gear for him for the first time, when he was eight or nine years old. They were too proud to accept charity, so Peter and Kira had to place fake adverts in the local paper so that every year some cheap, secondhand equipment in Amat’s size would just happen to show up. Kira built up a network of people all the way to Hed who took turns pretending to be the sellers.
“No, no . . . of course not, Amat, it would never even occur to me to say anything to the other players,” he mumbles.
Amat looks up, baffled. Then he snorts.
“The players? I don’t give a shit what you say to the players. Don’t say anything to Mom! She gets really pissed off if I do her job!”
Peter wishes he could say something to the boy just then. Something about how incredibly proud he made him out on the ice that evening. But he lacks the words for that; he doesn’t know how to go about it. And feels like a bad actor when he does try. Sometimes he gets so envious of David’s ability to make these young guys love him that it drives him mad. They trust David, they follow him, worship him. Peter feels like a forlorn parent at the playground watching some jokey mom or dad farther away who manages to get all the kids roaring with laughter.
So he says none of the things he’d like to say to Amat. Just smiles and nods, and manages to say: “You must be the only teenager in the world who gets told off by his mom for cleaning too much.”
Amat hands him a grown man’s shirt.
“One of the sponsors left this.”
It smells of alcohol. Peter slowly shakes his head.
“Look . . . Amat . . . I . . .”
Words fail him. All that comes out is:
“I think you should go out into the parking lot. You’ve never gone out of this rink after a match like this. I think you should, it’s quite an experience, one not many people get to have. You can walk through that door as . . . a winner.”