Chapter 155: Champions

Game six went to overtime; usually the biggest games always seemed to find their way to overtime, both teams too evenly matched and too desperate to let regulation decide anything so large. Tyler stood on the bench during the intermission before the extra period, watching Carter drink water with hands that, for the first time all playoffs, were visibly shaking.

The whole building had a different quality to it that night, seventeen thousand people aware they were watching something that mattered beyond the final score, a man's entire career narrowing down to whatever happened in the next twenty minutes. Tyler had played in front of bigger crowds before. He had never played in front of one holding its breath quite like this.

"You good?" Tyler asked.

"I'm good. Just want it to be over. Want it to be over with us winning, specifically." Carter managed a tight smile. "Nine years. Feels strange knowing this might be the last shift of it, whichever way it goes."

"It's not going to be your last shift losing. I can promise you that much."

"Confident."

"Earned confidence. We've been better than them the whole series." Tyler tapped his stick against Carter's, an old ritual neither of them had ever needed to name. "Let's go finish this."

Overtime lasted six minutes, tight and desperate on both ends, before Carter found the puck alone in the slot off a beautiful cross-ice feed from Chen, and buried it top shelf with the same clean, economical release he'd used to score a thousand goals before this one. The building came apart entirely, a sound Tyler had never quite experienced from the inside even after years in this league, something closer to a physical wave than noise.

Carter's teammates buried him at center ice, the pile growing by the second, and Tyler fought his way to the middle of it, found Carter laughing and crying at once beneath the scrum, no longer trying to hide either.

"You did it," Tyler said, close to his ear, the only two of them able to hear each other through the noise.

"We did it." Carter gripped his jersey hard, fistfuls of it, steadying himself against something too large to stand under alone. "Couldn't have finished it without you standing next to me. Whole season. Whole four years, really."

"Wouldn't have been anywhere to stand without you putting me there first."

They held onto each other a moment longer than the celebration strictly required, two men who had built something over four years that outlasted whatever the trophy would eventually represent. Then the rest of the team swept them both up into the wider chaos, champagne and camera flashes and Hernandez somewhere in the middle of it, uncharacteristically emotional, hugging every player he could reach.

Later, phone finally free of reporters, Tyler called Sofia from the tunnel, voice still hoarse from shouting.

"We won."

"I know. I watched every second." Her voice was thick with her own tears, unmistakable even through the phone. "Tyler, you won. Carter won. On his last game."

"He scored the winner himself. Overtime. Couldn't have written it better."

"I'm so proud of you. Both of you. All of you." A pause, and he could hear Emma shouting something ecstatic in the background about parliamentary honors for the entire roster. "The flight's still on for the fourteenth. You made it. Two full days to spare."

"Told you I would."

"You did. I believed you the whole time, mostly." Her laugh came through warm and unguarded. "Come home, champion. We have a suitcase waiting and a plane to catch, and I would very much like to kiss you somewhere that isn't a hockey rink."

"On my way."

He drove home in the dark hours after midnight, city lights blurring past, phone buzzing with messages he'd answer tomorrow, and found he wasn't thinking about the trophy at all by the time he reached the apartment, wasn't thinking about the parade that would come, the ring ceremony months away, any of the hockey machinery that would grind forward regardless of what he did next. He was thinking about Sofia waiting up despite the hour, about Emma's notebook surely already filled with tonight's box score, about a green dress hanging ready in a packed suitcase for a beach on the other side of the world.

Sofia met him at the door in her pajamas, hair loose, eyes red from crying happy tears through most of the third period, and pulled him inside before he'd even gotten his shoes off, kissing him there in the entryway with the whole championship season finally, completely behind them.

"Two days," she said against his mouth. "Then Cape Town."

"Then Cape Town," he agreed, and kissed her again, longer this time, one hand sliding into her loose hair, deepening it until she made a small sound against his mouth and pulled back just far enough to breathe.

"Shoes," she reminded him, laughing, breathless. "You still have your shoes on."

"Don't care."

"I do. Emma's awake; I can hear her door." Sofia stepped back just enough to let him toe off his shoes at the entryway, though she kept both hands fisted in the front of his shirt the entire time, unwilling to let more than a few inches open between them.

Emma appeared in the hallway a moment later, clearly listening for the door despite a bedtime that had come and gone hours earlier, notebook clutched to her chest, eyes wide with the particular delight of a child who had stayed up for something historic and been proven right.

"You won," she announced, as though there were any chance he might not know. "I recorded the whole game, overtime goal, six minutes and forty seconds in. Uncle Carter's name goes in the record book twice tonight. Once for winning, and once for retiring undefeated in his final game, which I believe is extremely rare."

"It's rare," Tyler agreed, crouching down to her level, still in his suit from the ceremony, exhaustion and joy tangled together in a way he'd never quite felt before tonight. "You should still be asleep."

"This was an emergency exception. Ambassador Pearl agreed it was warranted." Emma threw her arms around his neck, fierce and sudden, and held on. "I'm glad you're home, Tyler."

"Me too, kid. Me too."

Sofia watched them from the hallway, arms crossed, smiling the particular smile she wore when a moment was too full to interrupt with her own words. For a while none of them moved, the three of them standing together in the entryway at nearly two in the morning, exhausted and triumphant and entirely unwilling to end the night by simply going to bed like it was ordinary.