The crowd noise was deafening, but through it all, I heard Hog's voice booming from the bench: "That's soft hands, baby! Fucking surgical!"
With time winding down, I picked off a cross-ice pass and rimmed it around the boards. Jake collected it in stride, muscled past their winger, and suddenly we had numbers the other way.
This was it. This was when old Jake would have tried to do too much.
Instead, he made the perfect play.
Driving wide, he drew two defenders to him before threading a pass between their skates—right onto Kowalczyk's tape. The shot went high glove side, and the red light went on.
3-2.
The bench erupted. Pickle tried to climb over the boards to join the celebration and nearly took out a referee.
And Jake... Jake was looking at me again. Across the chaos of the celebration, through the maze of bodies and flying helmets, he found my eyes and held them. There was something in his expression I'd never seen before—not only happiness, but pride. It wasn't the desperate, look-at-me pride of someone trying to prove himself. It was the quiet satisfaction of a job done right.
As we neared victory, time slowed the way it does in moments that matter. I saw the lane to their empty net—a narrow corridor between two defenders. I saw Jake breaking toward the boards and drawing attention. Saw the clock ticking down: 1:18... 1:17... 1:16...
My shot was pure instinct, muscle memory from a thousand hours of practice—wrist shot, low and hard, aimed for the back corner of the net. The puck rose enough to clear the defenseman's stick and drop into the mesh.
4-2.
The Barn lost its collective mind.
I'd scored maybe a dozen goals in my entire career, and most of them were garbage-time, meaningless. This one mattered. Suddenly, Hog was there, wrapping me in a bear hug that lifted my skates clean off the ice.
"SPREADSHEET WITH THE DAGGER!" he roared in my ear. "THAT'S MY BEAUTIFUL DEFENSIVE BOY!"
Pickle crashed into us next, nearly toppling all three of us in a tangle of limbs and euphoria. The rest of the team piled on, a Storm-colored avalanche of celebration.
Through it all, over Hog's shoulder, I saw Jake.
He was hanging back from the scrum, watching. His grin was open and unguarded and aimed directly at me like a spotlight in the dark. When our eyes met, he raised his glove in a small salute—teammate to teammate, with a little more underneath.
Seconds later, the horn sounded. Game over. We'd won.
The locker room was a barely controlled explosion.
"SOFT HANDS!" Hog bellowed over the chaos, pointing at Jake with a protein bar. "Did you see that pass? Threading the needle like he's working with surgical equipment!"
"It was a good play," Jake agreed, ducking a flying towel. "Team effort."
"Team effort, my ass! That was pure artistry!" Hog disappeared into the equipment room, still shouting. "Nobody move! I got something!"
The music got turned down a notch when Coach Rusk appeared, but he didn't kill the celebration entirely. "Decent," he said.
Hog emerged from the equipment room carrying something small and blue in his massive hands.
"Gentlemen," he said, holding up his creation like it was the Crown Jewels. "I present to you... artisanal performance wear."
It was a glove cozy. Hand-knitted in Storm blue and white, roughly the size and shape of a hockey glove, with neat stitching around the edges. Across the back, in careful white letters, were the words: SOFT HANDS.
"Holy shit, Hog," Kowalczyk laughed. "You made that?"
"Damn right I did. Took me three episodes ofTrue Crime Weeklyand half a bottle of wine, but we got there." Hog held it up, admiring his handiwork. "This is for excellence in passing, demonstrated during clutch moments, with style points for making it look easy."
He crossed the room in three massive strides and presented it to Jake with mock ceremony, as if he were knighting him with a knitting needle.
"Jake 'Soft Hands' Riley," Hog lowered his head. "Please accept this token of appreciation for your dedication to the ancient art of not fucking up when it matters."
