The fourth game of the series arrived with the particular cruelty that only a one-game lead can inflict—comfortable enough to tempt the mind into futures it had not earned, fragile enough to punish any mind that accepted the invitation.
I felt the difference in the building before the anthem. The crowd noise had a thinner, more anxious edge. The warm-up battles carried a fraction more hesitation, as if the roster had collectively agreed not to be the first person to make a mistake that would turn a lead into a narrative. Damian skated through it like a man who had already declined the invitation to future-think and was simply waiting for the rest of us to do the same. I skated through it like a woman who had learned that the climate could hold the lead and was still pressure-testing the h
