Aspiring

All his life, Tyler Marchand had only dreamed of making it big in the NHL. He was passionate about his hockey and succeeding in doing his sport that he loved dearly. But some people weren’t like that. In fact, some people, even some of his closest friends were amateurs, weren’t “good enough.”

He didn’t think he was anything special either, coming from Hammonds’ Plains. He was ready for a big letdown and the words, “sorry, you’re just not good enough”, like the rest of his pals.

Yet, he didn’t receive those words. Instead he got praise for his offensive capabilities and his perfect body frame. He was put to the test in professional hockey leagues around Canada, until he reached the age of seventeen.

He never went to school and was homeschooled for most of his childhood, though he did learn and was exceptionally smart.

He stood on the small ice surface of the most popular and public ice hockey rink in Nova Scotia. It was that time of the year again, when players came out to showcase their talent and hockey IQ to the different college scouts and higher level professional scouts. The annual Nova Scotia Shoot-Out. Tyler was one of the skaters on the radar for certain teams and he was a skilled forward for the hometown team, the Nova Scotia Leopards.

He was shaken from his thoughts, as it became his turn to go. He launched off and the puck zipped past the goalie’s left shoulder and grazed the left goalpost before smacking the mesh at the back of the net.

“Can’t see it, can’t stop it, eh?” Tyler Marchand taunted, lightly, as he sped past the goalie. He spun on his skates and taunted him, as he backed away: “But you’re the expert at missing pucks, aren’t you, Millsy?” The goalie had heard that one a few times before.

The Nova Scotia Shoot-Out was nearly over by now. Tyler had seen his fellow goalie pal face more than a hundred wrist shots, snap shots, slap shots, backhanders, and dekes in a series of one-on-one showdowns. He had stopped most of them. Thirty shooters had been eliminated. Now it came down, as it did most years, to Tyler Marchand versus his rival Andrew Campbell. Each had three final shots. He had stopped both of their first efforts. Tyler had just scored on his second, a slapper that caught him leaning to his right. He plucked up his water bottle off the top of the net, flipped his mask up, and skated away from the net for a breather.

“Today, Millsy!” It was Andrew shouting from center ice, where he stood flipping a puck back and forth on his stick.

“Relax,” Tyler heard “Millsy” the goalie say, as much to himself as to them. The goalie leaned his head back and doused his face with water. Above him, in the steel rafters, Tyler glimpsed the faded blue-and-gold banners marking the Leopards’ progress in the state playoffs, 1998 to 2002: regional finalist, regional finalist, state quarterfinalist, semifinalist, runner-up. He leveled his gaze and looked past Andrew to a banner that had hung at the end of the rink for as long as he could remember. It read: “To win the game is great, to play the game is greater, to love the game is the greatest.” Tyler looked back down and saw Millsy skate slowly back to his net, set the bottle down, and pull his mask don over his face once more. Slapping the blade of his goalie stick once against each goalpost, he lowered himself into his semi-crouch and yelled, “Bring it on.”

Andrew was what hockey players admiringly call a “dangler,” with hands that cradled the puck as if it were no heavier than a tennis ball. He could dangle it between his skates, behind his back, one-handed, backhanded, skating backward, on one knee. All the while the puck stuck to his stick like a nickname. He had a thousand moves that he’d practiced for hours in his basement or late at night on a patch of ice behind his garage. He liked to practice in the darkness, the darker the better, so he was forced to rely not on his eyes, but on simply feeling the puck on his stick blade with his amazingly sure hands. That way he’d never have to look down, he could always be scanning the ice for an opening or an open man, and he’d always be ready when an opposing defenseman was lining him up for a hit.

He’d worked on one particular move for most of a season. He’d gotten the idea when they were playing in a tournament in Detroit. One night in their hotel room, they picked up a Canadian TV station broadcasting indoor lacrosse. The players ran around on a shiny concrete floor resembling a hockey rink, flinging a ball from thin sticks fitted with webbed leather baskets. “Man,” Andrew said, “if you could cradle the puck like that, how cool would that be?”

After practices, while the rest of them undressed, he’d take a bucket of pucks and position himself behind a net. With a puck at his feet, he’d try in one motion to scoop it up, raise it shoulder high, step out to the side of the net, and then sling the puck. Lacrosse style, into the upper corner of the goal. He quickly mastered the scooping part but had trouble keeping the puck on his stick, as he sidestepped out from behind the goal. Some nights the rest of them would come out of the showers and stand on the bench teasing him. But he kept at it. Coach watched too, but he didn’t say anything, at least not at first.

One afternoon, Tyler came out of the dressing room late and was nearly out the door to the parking lot, when he heard the whang of something hitting a goalpost. He knew Andrew was the only one on the ice, so he dropped his gear and walked back to see. He was standing behind a net with his back to him. There were four or five pucks at his feet, and a couple in the face-off circle to the right of the goal. Six or seven others lay in the net.

Tyler watched silently as he snatched up a puck, took two quick steps to his left, and whipped his stick around until it clanged on the goalpost and the puck flew into the high corner of the net. “Holy shit,” Tyler hissed. Andrew turned and grinned.

Coach spoke to Andrew about it for the first time before our next practice. Stickhandling drills were fine, Coach said, but he didn’t want to see any lacrosse shots during games. He called it “a fancy-ass fag move.”

Coach never used profanity around them, and he forbade them from using it. “Fag” and “faggot” were in a different category. Coach used them all the time to define for them what hockey was and wasn’t. Elbowing an opponent in the chin was hockey; kicking his skates out from under him was a fag move. Scorers who could take a hit were hockey players; scorers who shied from the rough stuff were fags.

Andrew never tried the lacrosse shot again in practice. But one night he swore Tyler to secret and told him, he’d kept practicing it behind his garage.

“For what?” he had attempted to ask.

He shrugged. “Coach is a dickhead.”

“No, he’s not. Are you saving it up for something?”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Maybe my ass.”

“Maybe I’m just a fag.”

Now Andrew shoved the puck out in front of him and took three long strides towards the goalie. He eased out from the net to cut off the angle. He gathered up the puck and, as he swerved left, the goalie followed him.

On most goalies, Andrew liked to fake a shot that would make them drop to the ice, then he’d either snap the puck over one of their shoulders or cut hard, flip the puck to his backhand, and skate around them in a burst to the open side of the net. But as a stand-up goalie, Millsy wasn’t as likely to drop. Andrew usually tried to beat him with a los shot to one of the corners, or he’d drive hard right at him and try to juke him to one side and slip the puck past him on the other.

He raised his stick high behind his left ear. Millsy braced himself for the explosion of wood and rubber while staying on his toes in case this was just the first part of whatever Andrew had planned, the part meant to fool him. But he wasn’t trying to trick him. His stick whipped down and Tyler heard the blade drive through the puck and saw it jump off the stick right at him. Not to his left or his right or even at his feet, where he might have left an opening, but right at him, chest high, the easiest of shots to stop. It hit him just above the sternum and he smothered it there with his catching glove.

Something was wrong. Andrew never hit goalies square in the chest.

Tyler watched him as he snagged another puck and headed to center ice to take his final shot before Tyler took his. Tyler began to laugh and he yelled, “One more and it’s oh for three and a hundred smackers for me, baby. Looks like you’ll be emptying out your pop machine.”

They had once been friends, in their early years with the Leopards. On the ice, they made a splendid pair. Andrew was the swift defenseman who set up plays with tape-to-tape passes and scored dramatic goals on end-to-end rushes. Tyler was the rough-and-tumble forward who mucked for pucks in the corners and scored his own scrappy goals on rebounds and deflections and scrums in front of the net. He was very similar to the Dallas Stars’ forward Valeri Nichushkin. Tyler loved turning Andrew’s perfect passes into goals; Andrew loved how Tyler peeled opponents off the puck. They were pals off the ice, too.

Their last year together, a rivalry developed. To a degree, it was no surprise. Tyler was being recruited by four or five big hockey colleges. Andrew, who lacked the speed and hands to play at that level, was living in Coach’s billets and wondering what came next. But there was more to it than just hockey, something Tyler couldn’t put a finger on. They spoke less and less. They sat at opposite ends of the team bus. Millsy had asked Tyler about it once and he brushed him off: “Andrew’s just a jealous bastard.”

Tyler wondered back then if Coach had something to do with it. He, Tyler, – or Marchy, as Coach called him – had always been the favored son. But their last season together, Coach took to calling Andrew “Tiger.” It bothered Tyler, though he tried not to show it. And now that he was about to leave Nova Scotia, Andrew was sickened by it.

Andrew had to score now and then hope Millsy would stop Tyler on his final shot. He circled at center ice, once, twice, three times before he started toward him. Andrew skirted the blue line and flipped the puck to his forehand, then back, then back again, trying to mesmerize the goalie. He knew his eyes were searching for his, but he stayed riveted on the puck. And then, in an instant, it was in the net. Maybe his eyes saw what happened. His brain sure didn’t. Neither did Tyler’s. One second the puck was in front of him, big as a pancake, and then he started to reach out with his stick and poke it away. The next second, it was gone.

Andrew drew it back to himself like a blackjack dealer and spun around on his blades, a full 360-degree spin-o-rama. He lost the puck in his whirling skates. Then he heard it thud against the back of the goal. It was the perfect dangle. Everyone watching whooped and whistled, while the goalie whacked the puck out of the net and Andrew glided away.

“Holy shit, Millsy,” Tyler shouted. “What was that?” They all laughed, except Andrew, who slid slowly along the boards across from Tyler, glaring. Millsy turned around and grabbed his water bottle again. He wasn’t really thirsty, but there was nowhere else to hide.

“Millsy!” Tyler shouted. He stood with the puck at his feet, ready for his last shot. “Looks like Coach is back from the dead. You think he heard you were back from the dead and wanted to see if you still sucked?” He heard some of the others chuckle. “Brings back memories, huh?”

Millsy barely had put the water bottle back when he leaped out and drove hard right at him. Usually that meant a shooter was going to try to deke, rather than shoot, but Tyler, whose puck-handling wasn’t as nimble as Andrew’s, almost always shot. However, he had better hands than Andrew’s and he had more confidence too. He loved to aim between the legs, so Millsy pressed his leg pads together and kept the bottom of his stick hard against the ice, as he moved backward with his strides. Just inside the blue line, he veered slightly to his left, the goalie’s right. Yeah, here comes a shot, Tyler thought. The puck was on his forehand. Millsy scrunched his head down and stiffened. Tyler veered farther to his right. He slid around in that direction, squaring himself to the puck. He wound up for a slap shot. As his stick reached back, he yowled, “Shaybu.”

Shaybu.

Millsy couldn’t help himself. It threw him so badly, that he took his eye off the puck and glanced up at him. He wasn’t looking, though. He was aborting his shot and snatching the puck away and cutting hard to his right. When he looked down again, the puck was gone. Off balance, the goalie kicked out his left leg, sprawling, and flailed at him with his catching glove. But he was by him. Over his shoulder, he watched his backhander snap the mesh in the upper left corner of the net. He stopped next to the goalpost and stood over him, gloating. “Thanks, Millsy!”

“Go away, Marchy,” the goalie whined.

“What the hell was that, Millsy?” It was Andrew, who’d skated up behind him. The goalie stumbled to his feet and saw he was angry.

“You can go to hell too!”

“Gosh, Millsy, Helen Keller could’ve stopped that.”

“Then next time get Helen Keller to play goal.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Whose side are you on?” Millsy dropped his catching glove and grabbed him by the jersey. He told him what Tyler had done. At first he looked at the goalie blankly. Then he turned and stared across the ice at Tyler, who was laughing it up again with the other guys, watching the scene.

“Andrew, what the hell is going on?” Tyler called from his spot, finally stopping in his laughter and asked, genuinely concerned.

Ignoring him, Andrew scooped up a puck with his stick, flipped it into the air, and caught it in his left glove. Then he stopped, and assuming a baseball hitter’s stance, tossed the puck up over his head. As it came down, he took a hard, fluid swing at it and connected with a solid thwack. The puck flew haphazardly at Tyler Marchand. He saw it at the last second and ducked. It missed his head by a couple of inches.

“What was that, man? I won fair and square, you didn’t! Before long I’ll have the Stanley Cup!” The other players grabbed him, laughing still, while Andrew skated off the ice.

Tyler shrugged and turned back to the others. In the distance, he saw a tall figure gliding toward him. The man was smiling and clapping. He had a typical coach mustache and he held himself with a high poise. He looked rather important. He walked right up to the young teen Shoot-Out winner. “Well done, I couldn’t help but be impressed by those hands and that skill, how would you like to come play for the Eagles?”

“The Eagles?” Tyler repeated, bewildered.

“The Boston College Eagles. We’d love for you to be a part of the team. I can give to a rundown of everything you’ll need.”

Tyler had just received another offer and he was happy. Plus, he had always wanted to go to Boston. Here, he was getting a chance to. He couldn’t be prouder of himself. And if Andrew was going to continue to be mad at him like this, than he wanted out of Nova Scotia as soon as possible.

The other players gave their approval to him and he finally sighed and nodded. “You got yourself a forward.”