The second game of the heavier series arrived with the particular gravity that only a one-game lead can generate when the opponent is built to punish comfort.
The building felt tighter than Game 1. Not louder. Tighter. Like the air itself had been instructed to make soft gaps more expensive. Warm-up carried fewer jokes and more deliberate collisions. Miller taped his stick in silence for once, which unsettled the rookies more than any speech about emotional continuity ever had. Damian skated through the pre-game like a man who had already accepted the cost of the evening and was simply waiting for the invoice to be itemized. I skated through it with the quieter knowledge that the climate we had built was about to be asked to hold a heavier sixty minutes than the first game, and that the h
