The Stanley Cup Final went the full distance, seven games of the hardest, most physically punishing hockey Cole had ever played, the series splitting evenly through six games until it arrived, finally, at the specific pressure cooker of a Game Seven on home ice, the entire season condensed into sixty minutes that would determine everything.
Cole had played in big games before — the national championship, the conference finals, the ordinary accumulated pressure of an entire professional career building toward exactly this moment. Nothing had prepared him for the specific weight of a Game Seven Stanley Cup Final, the crowd noise a physical thing pressing against his chest during warmups, the particular silence in the locker room beforehand that spoke to twenty-three men fully aware of exact
