an eye on my teammates as I kept the guy next to me from snatching the puck off my stick, I was all focus and all hockey. Get the puck. Pass it. Shoot it. Don’t let an opposing player get it. If they did get it, don’t let them keep it. Move the puck toward their goal and away from ours. Get the puck. Pass it. Shoot it.
Nothing else existed. Nothing else mattered. Sometimes when I was on the bench between my shifts, my mind would try to wander away from the game and the arena, but hockey was fast and chaotic, and that held my focus and, with very rare exceptions, didn’t leave space for worrying about anything else.
From warm-ups until the buzzer, I was calm and focused. Kind of ironic, given how much pressure I was under out here, but I wondered sometimes if that was part of it. There was a ton of pressure, but it was pressure to do something I was good at, and it mostly distracted me from anything else in the world. All the other shit on my mind? I left that at the locker room door, and for the next few hours, nothing existed but hockey. Just the way I liked it.
But games didn’t last forever, and as it always did sooner or later, the buzzer sounded.
We’d lost this one by a single goal. Disappointing, but losses happened.
In the locker room, I quickly stripped off my gear, grabbed a towel, and went in to get a shower before the reporters started crowding in for post-game interviews. I could handle them, but not right away. Thank God my coaches and teammates understood. If I tried to face reporters now, I’d be a fucking wreck, so the guys always covered for me and gave me some time.
In the shower, I let the water beat the back of my neck and shoulders, and I flattened my palm against the cool wall as I reminded myself again and again to breathe slowly and deeply. There was nothing to have a breakdown over, and the shaky, panicky feeling was just my brain resetting after a game. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was ever wrong, but the first few times this had happened during my college hockey days, I’d fallen apart, so I’d learned quickly to just breathe and talk myself through it.
This was the worst part of the night. Whether we won or lost, the post-game crash was never fun. It was like I’d been amped up all night, running on pure adrenaline, and now that the game was over, the adrenaline dropped out from under me.
This was the part where my brain caught up. Thoughts started crashing in about everything I’d done wrong during the game. Relief hit me because I didn’t need to be nervous about the game anymore—about screwing up for my team in front of dozens of cameras and thousands of people—but it was like I’d put those nerves on pause as soon as I’d hit the ice, and now they needed to run their course. And on top of that, everything else that kept my mind going ninety miles an hour when I wasn’t playing hockey? All that shit restarted as soon as the game was over. Hockey was a nice break from worrying about money, a noise my car was making, if I’d left something on at home, if someone might break into my condo or car while I was gone, my relationship (whatever it was) with Devin, and usually a handful of alarming headlines that I’d caught while perusing social media. The problem was when hockey was over and the dam broke again, and all those worries slammed into my brain the way defensemen sometimes slammed me into the glass.
Why am I the only one who has to do this? I asked myself every damned night. What the hell is wrong with me?
I never had come up with an answer to that.
Eventually, just like I always did, I pulled myself together, shut off the shower, and put on a pair of gym shorts. As soon as I stepped into the locker room, the reporters, camera lenses, and microphones were in my face.
“Can you tell us what went through your mind during the last two minutes of the second period?” one asked. “Did you expect it to play out that way?”
The last two minutes of the second period may as well have happened last week. That was the other shitty part of