Chapter 35 Playoffs
CALEB
The bracket came out on a Monday morning and by Monday afternoon every player on the Wolves had looked at it a minimum of fifteen times, which I knew because Eli told me he had looked at it seventeen times and Eli was not even the most anxious person on the team by a significant margin.
Sixty four teams. Six rounds. The kind of structure that looked organized and manageable on paper until you started tracing your specific path through it and understood that every single game was one you had to win to still be playing the next day, and that there were no soft games in a playoff bracket, only games you had prepared for correctly and games you had prepared for inadequately.
Coach pinned it to the board in the locker room and left it there without a single word of commentary. He put information in front of his players and then let it exist until it became real, which was his method of motivation and it was considerably more effective than anything he could have said.
I looked at it on Monday morning then again after class on Monday noon.
Then I put it out of my mind and thought about Pembrook, which was our first round opponent and a team I had watched two hours of film on before the bracket even came out.
Eli looked at the bracket sixteen more times.
You are spiraling, I told him Tuesday morning.
I am preparing, he said. They are different things.
They look so identical from the outside.
They are fundamentally different from the inside, he said, a distinction he was very committed to and which I had stopped challenging two years ago.
I called Mia the night before we play the Pembrook game.
She picked up on the second ring.
Nervous, she said.
No, I said.
She waited.
Slightly nervous, I said. Which is unusual. I have not been nervous before a game since junior year and this one has a different weight to it.
They all matter, she said.
This one is the start of something, I said. Or the end of something.
Depends on how you look at it, she said. From where I am sitting it looks like the continuation of something that has been building all season. You play every Thursday the same way and you win every Thursday the same way. Tomorrow is just another Thursday.
Same as every Thursday, I said.
Same as every Thursday, she said. Same time tomorrow.
Same time, Mia, I said.
There was a pause after that, the kind that did not feel empty. It felt like both of us thinking the same thought and not needing to say it out loud to confirm it existed.
Thursday arrived cold and clean and the arena was louder than a regular season game, not all the way to playoff loud yet but with the specific edge of a crowd that understood something was beginning.
I found Mia on the bench in warmup. Clipboard. Hair up. Eyes already moving across the ice in the tracking pattern she had developed over two years of watching this team. She had been there for every game of my junior career, filling water bottles and logging inventory and doing the invisible work that kept everything running without anyone noticing it was being done.
She was not invisible to me anymore.
She looked up and found me across the ice.
I tapped the ice once with my stick.
She nodded.
I skated back to center.
We won four to one, which was the score and not the full story, because the full story was a scoreless first period and a tight grinding game that required patience rather than power, and patience was something this team had spent three months building under Coach's specific and unglamorous methods.
I scored in the second period. Eli scored in the third on a backhand that surprised everyone including Eli.
Two more goals in the final ten minutes.
Four to one.
In the tunnel afterward I found Mia at the equipment cart.
Five more games, I said.
She looked up.
If we win five more games, I said, we win the championship.
She looked at me for a long moment with those clear direct eyes.
Then win five more games, she said. The same way you won tonight. Play the game in front of you, not the game at the end of the bracket.
You have been saying some version of that to me since October, I said.
You keep needing it in different versions, she said.
She went back to her log.
My phone buzzed on the equipment cart.
Walter: Watched the stream. Clean game throughout. Porter’s assistant was in the building tonight. He sent me a text afterward. Two words only. Very good.
I looked at the message.
Then at the bracket on the wall of the tunnel.
One down.
Five more to go.
Same time tomorrow.
And for the first time since the bracket came out, I realized I was not thinking about the number of games left like a countdown. I was thinking about it like a path that only worked if you stayed inside each step without jumping ahead.