The sixth game of the series arrived wearing the particular cologne of a possible clincher—part adrenaline, part dread, part the collective delusion that if everyone just clenched hard enough the hockey gods might finally mind their own business.
The building was a pressure cooker with better lighting. Warm-up felt like a group project where half the participants had done the reading and the other half were hoping the captain’s aura would carry the PowerPoint. Damian skated through it like a man who had already declined every invitation to panic and was simply waiting for the group chat to catch up. I skated through it with the quieter knowledge that the climate we had built was about to be asked to hold a game that could end the series or send us to a seventh game that would almost certa
