Chapter 72 THE PLAYOFFS AND THE WAITING
Chapter 72 THE PLAYOFFS AND THE WAITING
POV: Reese Calloway
Two weeks of games and I watched every one of them.
Home games from the press section with the camera in my lap. Away games from the couch with the television on and my phone beside me and the laptop closed because I'd learned by now that trying to work during a game meant doing neither thing properly. I watched all of it and I understood about eighty percent of what I was watching, which I mentioned to Cole on a call between the second and third rounds.
He went quiet for a second.
"Eighty," he said.
"Approximately," I said.
Another second of quiet and then he said: "That's." He stopped. "Yeah." The specific compression of someone containing a reaction they'd decided was disproportionate to the information received.
"You look unreasonably proud," I said.
"I can't see you," he said.
"I can tell anyway," I said.
He laughed and changed the subject and I let him change it and made a note to tell Tommy, who I knew would find it at least as funny as I did.
Tommy was playing well.
Not just the hockey, though the hockey was good, his positioning improving across the playoff run in ways that the sports coverage was starting to notice and attribute correctly to a player who had stopped carrying something heavy and had found out what he could do with the energy that freed up. His league welfare work was being covered alongside the hockey, thoughtfully and by journalists who had taken the time to understand what the position actually involved rather than treating it as a sidebar to the suspension story.
He texted me links when pieces went up.
Not all of them, just the ones that got it right. I saved every one in a folder on my phone that was getting longer each week.
June flew out for the away game in the conference finals.
She texted me from the arena, a photograph of her seat in the visitor's press section, no caption, which was June's way of saying she was there and didn't need to explain why. She'd become genuinely invested in the team across the months since the documentary, in the way that happened when you'd been in rooms with people during something real and the professional relationship had become something else that didn't have a clean name.
She stayed for the postgame and flew back the next morning and sent me a photograph of the ice before the arena lights went down.
The series went to Game 7.
I was in Chicago for the home game, press section, fourth row from the glass. The arena was at the specific volume of a crowd that had been through six games and understood what the seventh one meant and had decided to be as loud as possible about it from the opening faceoff.
I had the camera in my lap.
My heart rate had nothing to do with the camera.
Cole played all sixty minutes and overtime in a way I hadn't seen from him in any of the games I'd watched from the press section or the couch. His face in the public setting was the most unguarded I'd seen it in any arena, none of the managed awareness of a player who understood cameras were on him, just the pure thing underneath it, the concentration and the physicality and the love of the ice that had been there in the private practice session I'd gotten on the ice for and was here now in front of twenty thousand people because there was no room for anything except the game.
I raised the camera when the overtime started and kept it up.
The overtime goal happened at the wrong angle. I had the net to my left and Cole was coming from the right side and the defenseman was between us and I pressed the shutter anyway because not pressing it wasn't a real option.
The arena went loud all at once.
I had fifty other frames from the night that were extraordinary. The third period shift where he drove the boards and the light caught perfectly. The bench, Tommy on his feet with both hands on the boards. The crowd in the upper section at the moment the puck dropped for overtime, forty thousand expressions of the same thing.
And the one where Cole scored and turned up the ice and his eyes went to the press section.
Directly to the fourth row.
To me.
In an arena with twenty thousand people and the specific chaos of a goal in overtime of Game 7, he looked up and found me in four seconds and his face in the moment before he registered the crowd around him was the face from the darkroom wall, the one from day one, completely unguarded and entirely his.
I pressed the shutter.
The chaos afterward was total.
The arena noise at a level that required no thought about anything except the fact of it. I stayed in the press section while the ice filled and the celebration organized itself and twenty thousand people did what twenty thousand people did when something they'd been holding onto for three hours finally got to release.
Twenty minutes later Cole came through the side door into the press corridor.
Still in his gear. Hair wet from sweat, not from a shower. He hadn't been to the locker room yet. He came through the door and his eyes found me the same way they'd found me from the ice and he crossed the corridor and stopped in front of me.
The celebration was audible through the walls, the locker room somewhere behind him still running at full volume.
"I was going to wait," he said. His voice was still at the slightly elevated register of someone who had been playing at full intensity for sixty-three minutes and hadn't come down yet. "To ask. I was going to wait until after everything settled."
"Ask what?" I said.
He looked at me.
He took a breath.