Sasha Volkov's first game for the Northbridge University men's ice hockey team took place on a cold Saturday afternoon in October, nine years almost to the week since Reese Kellan had first walked into that same locker room, and Cole found himself standing rink-side with Reese, both their children bundled against the autumn chill, watching history repeat itself with the specific, deliberate difference that came from an entire community having learned, finally, how to do this better the second time around.
The locker room situation had been resolved months in advance this time — no scrambling trainers' room, no forty-minute early arrivals born of necessity rather than choice, the athletic department having built, in the years since Reese's own complicated integration, an actual infrastruct
