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“Yeah. Mostly by me,” I said, instantly feeling whiny.

“Let's give it a week or so, Jean Pierre.”

“OK, but the series moves back to my place next time. I need the home-ice advantage. I'm already down 0–1,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

“What is this? Best of seven?”

“Best of whatever it takes,” I said.

We did the dishes, at the end of which I used a hook shot to launch an SOS pad at the wastebasket. My shot was going long but Faith reached out with her right hand and slammed it into the basket with an authoritative alley-oop flourish. “You get the assist,” she said, pointing at me as if we were on a basketball court.

“I think I should go home tonight,” I said.

Faith said she understood.

We kissed good night in a perfunctory way. I drove home unhappy and confused and wishing my Ferrari had an automatic transmission so I could spend less time shifting and more time feeling sorry for myself.

*   *   *

It was strange that I didn't throw up before our Tuesday-night game with Washington. That happens two or three times a season but never before home games, where the pressure is greater than it is on the road. I also didn't play very well but we won 7–4, which is all that counts. Quig and Cam had a busy night. That's because the more Gaston Deveau scores—and that's a lot since he moved to center—the more he gets hammered by opposing checkers and goons. The tactic is as old and as primitive as the game, but a lot of time you see another team's fourth-liners, fringe players, sent out to rough up a scorer. Washington's Drew Campbell, a spare part who's lucky to be in the lineup, started hacking at Gaston early in the game. The theory here is that if Gaston retaliates and both players get sent to the penalty box, then our team loses its number two scorer and all the Caps lose is a no-talent stiff. Worse, if the refs catch only Gaston retaliating and don't see the original infraction—and that happens a lot—then Washington gets a power play. Someone had to stop it and that someone was Quigley. It was worth the instigator penalty to watch Quig drop Campbell with a two-punch combo—
Splat! Splat!
—you could probably hear in row 15. The guys on our bench were standing up pounding their sticks on the boards—the age-old hockey players' applause—when Quig effectively won us the game by challenging the Washington bench. He skated over to within ten feet of the bench and used both hands in a gesture that said, “Come on. Who's next?” There were no takers. And there was no one hassling Gaston for the rest of the game. Set the price high enough and no one will pay it. I don't know where our team would be without Kevin Quigley. Out of the playoff run probably. That's why I was shocked by what happened a few weeks later in Detroit.

We played in a sold-out and screaming Joe Louis Arena and won 3–2. I had thirty saves, twelve of them in the last period, when we were just hanging on and the Detroit crowd—one of the greatest in hockey—was in full roar. Packy liked Gaston at center so much that he moved Taki to right wing. Quig's line was on the ice late in the game when I smothered a puck with my catching hand and the Red Wings' Bobby LaForrest whacked me with his stick on the back of my glove trying to get me to cough up the puck. The ref didn't whistle a penalty, probably because we were in the late stages of a close game. Refs say they don't officiate the clock or the score. Refs lie. Hockey's Code requires that an opposing player taking liberties with a goaltender has to answer for his crime, so I wasn't surprised to see Quigley skate over to LaForrest. I was surprised when all Quig did was point to the scoreboard and tell LaForrest, “You're not worth taking a penalty on.” I've seen Quig beat the shit out of guys for less—close score or no close score. It was a very un-Quigley-like thing to do. I filed it in my memory.

I didn't see Faith when we got back to Boston, partly because she was getting ready for her last semester of med school and partly because we had back-to-back games. We beat L.A. 5–0 at the Garden on Saturday afternoon. That was my fifth shutout of the season and I was starting to think I might have a shot at playing in the All-Star Game in early February. In another surprise move, no doubt dictated by the Mad Hatter, Kent Wilson started Sunday at the Garden against the Islanders, and the boy wonder got blown out 5–4. I thought Wilson might get sent down but he was still around at Monday's practice. And now he had an official nameplate above his locker.

Rinky started at Washington, where he lost a 1–0 heartache, and I had a comparatively easy seventeen-save game in our 5–2 home win over Ottawa. Then it started to unravel.

I lost three in a row, 2–1 at St. Louis in the opener of a home-and-home, 4–3 to St. Louis in Boston, and an embarrassing 8–4 loss to the Rangers in Madison Square Garden where Packy had to take me out in the first period. Packy usually makes his goalie changes between periods, which Rinky and I like because it's a lot less embarrassing than making that long skate to the bench in front of seventeen thousand people during a stoppage in play. But we were down 4–0 in the first twelve minutes of the game. After the fourth goal, Packy sent Rinky over the boards and called me to the bench. I got a loud mock cheer from the Ranger's fans, who rank with Philly's as the toughest in the league. After the game we were filing off the ice when a fan chinned himself up on the glass and called Luther Brown a nigger. Luther and Bruno Govoni climbed the glass and went into the stands after the guy but he'd run away by the time they dropped into the seats like paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne. Kevin Quigley, always our last guy off the ice—just in case he has to engage in a rearguard action—made a move to go into the stands but changed his mind. “That scumbag's gone. They'll never catch him,” Quig said. That surprised me too. Common sense never stopped Kevin before.

We chartered out of New York right after the game, arrived in Ottawa at 2 a.m., and that night suffered our fourth loss in a row, 4–3 to the Senators, with Rinky Higgins in net. We were still in second place but ten points behind the Canadiens and only two in front of Ottawa when we came limping back to Boston.

We had midweek home games against Florida and Chicago, then a rare open weekend, the Sunday of which was reserved for the Bruins Wives Carnival to benefit the Boston Boys and Girls Club. We beat Florida 4–2 thanks to Jean-Baptiste's hat trick, then knocked off Chicago (hands down the best uniforms in pro sports) 2–1. I started both games but Kent Wilson was the designated backup against Chicago, which meant Rinky watched the game from the press box.

“Hard to be happy about that,” he told me.

*   *   *

Faith phoned me a few times after our unhappy talk at her house but we didn't see each other until the Wives Carnival. Tamara Carter, the carnival's organizer, had Rinky, Kent, and me in our goalie gear, and we took turns standing in front of a net facing shots from kids whose parents paid $10 for four pucks. A few hours of that is damn tiring if you want to know the truth. Faith wandered over a couple of times mainly because located to the left of the shoot-on-a-pro-goalie area, Kevin Quigley was conducting a shooting clinic. “I just come over to hear Kevin talk,” Faith said right after Quigley had explained to a bunch of kids the difference between the slapshot and wrist shot: “You don't always have to use the slappah, the wristah is bettah because you get it off quickah.”

“Stick around. Pretty soon he'll talk about the backhandah,” I said to Faith.

“Cam and Tamara invited us for dinner,” she said. “You OK with that?”

“Sure. The series moves to a neutral site,” I said.

“Let's not argue tonight, Jean Pierre. Promise?”

I promised but I didn't really have to. Faith and I had decided months earlier that any couple who argue in front of other people are major losers and automatically out of our social rotation.

*   *   *

Topic A at Cam's house was Kevin James Quigley. “He's playing like he has tenure,” said Faith, who'd seen all of our recent games either at the Garden or on TV and to whom it was obvious, as it was to Cam and me, not only that Quigley was becoming a reluctant enforcer but that he wasn't even banging in the corners and getting the puck to Taki and Gaston.

“It's like he thinks he's in the NHL for his hands,” Cam said.

“He is. Sort of,” said Tamara, curling her hands into fists and striking a laughably bad pose as a boxer.

“You can't crank it up for all eighty-two,” I said, reiterating a fundamental tenet of an NHL season: that no matter how much we deny it, even to ourselves, there are games where we simply take a night off. It's not premeditated. It's not that we consciously want to do it. It's just that the season is so freaking long and the only part that really counts is at the end. So I think it's our mind's way of preserving our body. The writers like to use the phrase “so-and-so thinks he can turn it on and off like a faucet.” That isn't true. The damn faucet sometimes turns itself on and off. The main thing is that it's on in April, May, and June for the playoffs.

“Kevin was great with the kids. As usual,” Tam said.

“Hell be great with the kids in Providence freaking Rhode Island if he doesn't go back to being his ornery old self,” Cam said.

“You want to invoke the No-Hockey Rule?” Faith asked.

“Moved and seconded,” said Tamara. “All in favor?” The four of us raised our hands. The No-Hockey Rule is when we don't allow shoptalk at the dinner table. It can be a great idea in the middle of a long season. So for the rest of dinner and far into that cold January night we were just four old friends talking about movies, music, books, and our parents. Faith never mentioned her internship choices and I never brought up the trade deadline. “Is it a violation of the rule if I ask what's up with our agent and your mother?” Cam asked.

“Major violation,” I said, but we all laughed because we all knew something was up.

“Just have to let 'em play it out. So to speak,” Faith said.

Afterward, Faith and I went back to my condo and made love like sex-starved teenagers. Sex doesn't solve problems but it restores an emotional balance—“mental homeostasis,” Faith calls it—that makes problems less scary.

We were scheduled to close out January with a Wednesday-night game in Montreal. On Monday morning Cecilia Lopes, the team's PR director, asked Cam, Gaston, and me to come to her office after practice because a feature writer for the English-language
Montreal Gazette
wanted a phone interview with us—the three Vermont alumni—for what Cecilia called “a big takeout in Wednesday's paper.”

*   *   *

It was dark with temperatures in the low teens and a north wind whipping icy snow against the bus windows as we rode from Trudean Airport to downtown Montreal late Tuesday afternoon. It was the part of the season when, as Cam says, “You're sick and tired of being sick and tired.” We were also banged up. Cam was playing with a sprained left shoulder, Flipside had been hacking and coughing since Monday's practice, Luther Brown was back in Boston with the flu, and Bruno had a bruised ankle from a shot he blocked in the Chicago game. Bruno finished the game only because he refused to let trainer Richie Boyle take off the skate boot. “If you take it off my ankle will swell and I won't be able to get my foot back into the boot,” Bruno said in a remark that tells you all you have to know about how hockey players see injuries.

I was happy to see that—bruised ankle notwithstanding—Bruno's sense of humor remained intact. We were stuck in downtown rush-hour traffic when Bruno borrowed the bus driver's microphone to read us a selection from
Letters to Penthouse.
But instead of reading it as it was written, Bruno kept substituting Rex Conway's name for the name of the guy in the letter, who I think was having sex with three sorority sisters in a cornfield.
“Oh, Rex, do me next, moaned the writhing brunette…”
We were all laughing except Rex, who said, “And the men of Sodom were very wicked, and sinners before the face of the Lord, beyond measure. Genesis thirteen, thirteen.” Rex has a way of making the Bible sound funnier than
Letters to Penthouse.
Or maybe you had to be on our bus.

Cecilia Lopes wasn't kidding about the
Montreal Gazette
doing a huge takeout on Cam, Gaston, and me. The story started on page 1—right up there with the wars, murders, and political scandals—then jumped to the sports section. There were all sorts of photos of the three of us going all the way back to our years at Vermont. The writer made a lot out of the friendship between Cam and me—“the Beacon Hill Brahmin and heir to the Carter fortune and the blue-collar kid abandoned by his father and raised by his mother in gritty working-class Lewiston, Maine”—as if it were surprising that a couple of guys from different social worlds could be good friends and teammates. But that's the great thing about sport. It's a meritocracy, especially a blood sport like hockey. In this business we give up our bodies for each other and judge each other only by what we do and how well we do it. I don't think it's that way in most business offices. It's one of the reasons I want to play as long as I can and never go into the world of cubicles, annual reviews, and staff meetings.

*   *   *

It was snowing too hard for me to take my usual walk into old Montreal, which is why I was hanging around my room after dinner when Gaston called. “Hey, JP, heads up, our old alma mater is on TV tonight. Playing UMass-Amherst. Go, Cats, go.”

“Thanks. Tell Cam,” I said.

“Already did. We're watching it in your room.”

Burlington, Vermont, is so close to Montreal that we could pick up the telecast of a rare midweek college game. Vermont ranked seventh in the nation and was second, behind Boston University, in Hockey East. Goalie Rudy Evanston was playing like an all-American. At least that's what I'd read in the papers. What I saw on TV was appalling. Two of Rudy's first three stops were spectacular glove saves but only because Rudy was farther off of his angles than I was in high school trig.