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goal.”
    â€œCost us the game.”
    â€œIt was a best-of-seven series for Christ’s sake, Cam.”
    â€œCost us home ice.”
    â€œThink of all the saves I made.”
    â€œThat goal was like letting in a sectional sofa.”
    â€œI’ll get even, Cam. Payback’s a bitch, babe.”
    *   *   *
    Cam was joking but he’d made a point. It’s harder to be a good good-team goalie than a good bad-team goalie. A good bad-team goalie knows he’s going to get a lot of shots—a lot of chances to be a star—and his team isn’t expected to win, so there’s less pressure. All a good bad-team goalie has to do is keep it close, and because what a goalie does is so obvious to fans, he’s a hero. It’s different on contending teams like ours. There’s more pressure because there’s more at stake. The job isn’t about making forty saves a game. It’s about making the two or three saves that make winning possible. Goaltending for a good team is less about being a star than about overcoming fear, injury, fatigue, sickness, circumstance, and other people’s mistakes to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Not some of the time. All of the time.
    *   *   *
    We beat the Rangers 5–1 Thursday night. It was a typical preseason game. I didn’t recognize half of the Rangers players because they were all minor leaguers auditioning for jobs. Most of them would end up back in the AHL. But the game meant more than most exhibitions because part of the proceeds went to the Lake Champlain Medical Center, where private donations were funding one of those hostels where parents can stay while their kids are being treated.
    There must’ve been a lot of Vermont fans in the building, because Cam and I got cheered every time we touched the puck even though the Rangers were supposed to be the home team. Cam scored one of his rare goals—slapshot from the right point that dinged in off of the crossbar—and the fans chanted, “Go, Cats, Go.” The college atmosphere made me think of the great times I’d had playing in Burlington. A minute later I blew the shutout by giving up a sixty-footer. It was embarrassing. The first thing you want to do is smash your stick over the crossbar, partly to let out the frustration and partly as a cheap way of publicly apologizing for your gaffe. But I’d learned not to do that. I learned it the same way I learned everything else I knew about goaltending—the hard way. It was mostly Chantal Lewis’s fault. Chantal and I were freshmen at St. Dominic’s High School. She was a cheerleader. I was the JV goalie. I thought she was prettier than a five-goal lead, which is the main reason I never got up the nerve to talk to her. She used to show up for the third period of some of our games because the varsity played the next game and she was dating a sophomore defenseman. Chantal Lewis was worth a goal a game to the opposition any time I knew she was in the rink. And knowing she was there wasn’t hard, because only a dozen or so people came to JV games. Take Chantal Lewis out of my high school and I would’ve had a better goals-allowed average and more than one college scholarship offer. It was a Saturday in February when I went out for the third period and saw Chantal and her cheerleader friends sitting in the stands behind my goal. We had a one-goal lead at the time but not for long because in the first minute I let in a shot that skidded under the stick blade that I should have had on the ice. Embarrassed and frustrated I smashed my goal stick over the crossbar. Right away our coach pulled me out.
    â€œGrab some pine,” he said as I took a seat on the end of the bench and watched our backup goalie play—and play well—in a game we’d go on to win 4–2.
    â€œYou know why I pulled you?” Coach asked me after the