Page 44 of Home Ice Advantage

Petey didn’t answer, and Eric didn’t have a chance to argue with that serene smile, as the team and Sully both started to come down the tunnel toward the ice. The power play practice might have been a success, but the vague sense of unease was still present. The sense that something dangerous was about to happen. He just didn’t have any fucking cluewhatthat was.

“Really, do you want me to get you a step stool?” Aronson asked Ryan, midgame.

Ryan, perched on top of the bench so he could get a better view of exactly how badly the Beacons were getting crushed by the Toronto Justice, sighed. It was one of those games where no matter what adjustments he tried to make on the fly, nothing was really working. He had probably been shown on the broadcast at least once hiding his face in his hand when a bad defensive-zone giveaway had immediately ended up in the back of Davey’s net.

“I can see fine from up here,” he said. “Not like there’s much to see.”

Aronson surveyed the ice: it was the last few minutes of the second period, and they were down three goals. It wasn’t impossible to mount a comeback, but it wasn’t likely, especially because all four lines had been struggling with successful zone entries. Or zone exits. In all three zones.

Ryan felt like he was vibrating out of his skin. Hehatedlosing so fucking much, even when he wasn’t the one on the ice anymore. He had known going into it that the Beacons were rebuilding, that the team was not good on paper and in practice might have been worse with regressions and underperformances.

Knowing and experiencing it were two different things, especially because he had to keep it cool and keep his philosophy firmly in practice. He was focusing on the positive, encouraging, helping the players grow. He wasnotripping them apart or tearing them down.

But Ryan hated losing.

And watching Laurent Martel take a stupid penalty right at the end of the period, which meant they would be starting the third on the kill again? Ryan thought that maybe the top of his head was just going to explode.

Mercifully, the horn sounded to end the period, and the players filed back toward the locker room to rest, refuel and, depending on their preferences, have their gear changed or dried. The coaches followed after.

Aronson said, “Is this it? The game that’s going to break the illustrious Ryan Sullivan?”

“We still have a whole damn period to play,” Ryan said to him. “We can come back and win it.”

Aronson pushed his glasses up his nose and gave Ryan one of those looks, sardonic and judging, that used to piss him off but now mostly made him squirm a little uncomfortably, knowing what that usually preceded. “You don’t really believe that.”

“No, but I’m sure as hell going to try to convincethemof it,” Ryan said, and pushed the doors to the locker room open.

It was only during the worst games that the coach went immediately into the locker room between periods. The team would know, immediately, that they’d fucked up.

Whenever he gave speeches like this Ryan could never remember what he said afterward. It was like he entered into some sort of a fugue state, passionately expounding on the fact that they needed to play smart and stay out of the box, that they needed to anticipate the play better and think about where they were positioning themselves off the puck. Things just came out of his mouth without his brain’s conscious input.

All he could see were the faces of the players immediately in front of him. Williams’s serious determination. Cook’s smile. Martel’s scowl.

At the end of it, he exhaled and said, “It’s a rebuilding year. But I know you hate losing as much as I do, and I’ve seen you play with more effort than we’ve been putting in tonight. Let’s go out for the third and keep it tight and give them hell. All right. Thanks, boys.”

“I can always bag skate them,” Aronson said, as they and Petey left the players to finish changing.

“Not very chill of you, Roney,” Petey said.

Ryan shook his head. “Absolutely not. We’ll switch up the practices, keep them moving, but it has to stay fun and it has to stay motivating.”

“Optimism is a disease,” Aronson said, shaking his head. But on the bench, it was different.

Ryan wasn’t sure exactly when things had shifted, but he wasn’t complaining. Somehow, in between the hotel rooms and apartments and the rest of it, working with Aronson on the bench had gotten—easier.

They still had their tactical disagreements, especially about the power play, but since the first night against Colorado, when Aronson had directly contradicted his requests, things had settled. Ryan had to admit that, maybe, he was also more open to listening...but there was only so much they could do with the roster. If he split up Cook and Williams, then instead of one line that could score, he had zero lines that could score. And there weren’t many other options for shuffling the lines around.

The Beacons mounted a spirited comeback in the third, mostly on Williams’s back. He seemed determined to single-handedly win it, from the thread-needle passes to set Cook up for one-timers to his own drive to the net to shovel in a rebound. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough.

Ryan pulled Davey with three minutes to go to try to get them the extra goal and maybe push it to overtime, but the empty netter sealed their fate instead. Losing 4-2 wasn’t as bad as getting shut out 3-0, technically, but it felt the same.

Ryan had to face the media after every game, and he always tried to keep it the same tone: even, never too high, never too low. He didn’t call out individual players. But there were always pointed questions he couldn’t entirely talk his way out of.

“Sully, what do you think about the fact that there just isn’t any secondary scoring on this team?” someone asked from the scrum.

Ryan couldn’t lie and say that they were playing the right way 5v5, because the numbers were quite clear that they weren’t, whether you were looking at publicly available stats or the Beacons’ own internal numbers. But he tried not to throw anyone under the bus as his usual philosophy.

Instead, he exhaled, and said, “We just have to get back to playing the right way, keeping track of the little things, taking care of the team. It’s easy to get complacent across the season, and I know that the next game, after these practices, we’re gonna clean this shit—sorry, excuse my language—up.”

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