Rory
My head wasn't in the game before I even stepped onto the ice, which is exactly the kind of sentence coaches warn you never to let become true, and exactly the kind of sentence that was, unfortunately, entirely true.
Qualifiers had circled back around with a vengeance, this round carrying weight the fall matches hadn't — win, and Thornebridge locked its spot in the postseason bracket outright. Lose, and the whole season's fate got shoved into a tiebreaker nobody wanted to think about. Coach Reyes had spent the entire pregame speech radiating the specific grim focus of a man who understood exactly what was riding on the next sixty minutes, and I'd nodded along with everyone else while my brain stayed lodged firmly in a private hallway from days ago, replaying a stranger's voice and t
