NOVA
Cole invited me to watch practice from the boards.
Not from the glass-walled viewing box where I’d spent my first day cataloguing whatever was wrong with his left shoulder from a safe, clinical distance. Not from the family section in the upper bowl where management parked visiting executives and sponsors’ wives. From the boards. Rinkside. Close enough to feel the spray of ice when a player stopped hard, close enough to hear the crack of stick on puck without the muffling filter of plexiglass and concrete.
He’d texted me at 6:14 AM. Three sentences.
*Practice at 8. Come watch from the bench level. I want you to see something.*
I should have said no. I had intake reports to finish, a session with one of the rookies who was quietly spiraling after being scratched from the lineup th
