The second game of the series arrived with the particular weight that only a one-game lead can carry—light enough to tempt complacency, heavy enough to punish it without mercy.
I felt the difference in the building before I felt it on the ice. The crowd noise had a sharper edge. The warm-up puck battles carried a fraction more intent. Even Miller’s pre-game ritual of taping and re-taping his stick three times had a tighter, less performative quality. Damian stood at the far end of the ice during stretches and looked like a man who had already watched the game once in his head and was simply waiting for the rest of us to catch up to the footage.
We lost.
Not in a collapse. Not in a humiliation. In a slow, grinding, one-goal erosion that left the locker room sounding like a held breath th
