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Now that you think I'm one of these obnoxious nouveau riche pro athletes we're all tired of reading about, I should explain that I'm a widower. I hate that old-fashioned word—
widower
. It makes me think of the nodders and droolers you see slumped in wheelchairs in nursing home parlors. But I don't know what else to call myself. Lisa was twenty-eight—two years older than I—when small-cell lung cancer ripped through her like fire through a three-decker. Took her down seven months after a self-congratulatory surgeon came out of the operating room at St. Elizabeth's and told me, “We did it. Got it all.” Doctors always say they won. The operation is always “a success.” Must be nice to be the one who gets to decide. None of Lisa's doctors showed up at her funeral. Four of her nurses did.

Lisa was a registered nurse. She gave me the skinny on male doctors. Maybe there are a few saintly ones at inner-city clinics and a handful of medical missionaries working in a jungle somewhere, but they're the minority. Ask any young female nurse and you'll find out that a lot of male physicians are as vain, arrogant, and horny as an NHL owner. Some docs will hit on your wife or girlfriend as fast as they'll take swag from a drug company. Lisa liked her job as an oncology ward nurse and she worked part-time even after we got married. But I think she took more hits from doctors than I take in an NHL season. Unlike me, Lisa never got scored on. “One more dinner invitation and I tell your wife, your girlfriend, or Cam Carter,” Lisa would say in a voice serious enough to keep the doc off balance.

Forced to choose from Lisa's list I doubt any of the doctors would've picked Cam Carter, my teammate, friend, fishing buddy, confidant, onetime best man, investments adviser, and part-time bodyguard. Maybe you were watching the playoff game two seasons ago when we were hammering Philly 5–1 in the third period and Serge “the Weasel” Balon of the Flyers jumped on me and cross-checked me on the back of the neck after I'd fallen on a loose puck. That was Cam you saw dropping his right glove, putting two fingers in Balon's nostrils, lifting him up about a foot, then using a gloved left hand to fetch Serge a clout on the ear that dropped the Weasel like a sack of cow manure. Cam would've hit Serge with a bare fist if we weren't all such good friends.

The ref gave Cam a five-minute penalty, which didn't matter because we won the game anyway. The best part was when that smarmy Channel 8 TV reporter Alvin “Captain Baritone” Crouch asked Cam on a live-from-the-dressing-room interview after the game: “How can you explain that kind of violence?”

“It wasn't violence. It was justice,” Cam said.

I think even Balon agreed. Two nights later, after we eliminated Philly, we went through the postgame handshake line and no one was chirpier than Serge. “Good series, JP,” he said, shaking my hand and giving me a squeeze on the neck he'd tried to chop off. “You're in my golf tournament in July, right?”

“If I get the same pole dancer who caddied for me last year,” I said.

“She could really tend your pin, eh?”

“Good luck against Montreal,” I heard Balon say to Cam, who was two players behind me in line.

What Captain Baritone and a lot of reporters and fans don't know about the culture of professional hockey is well worth knowing. As Robert Duvall said in
The Godfather,
“It's business, not personal.” Balon is what players call “a shit disturber” and management calls “an energy guy.” Every good team has one. Serge's job is to get under our skin, get us off of our game. He's the best at what he does.

Cam, a six-foot-four, 230-pound defenseman, is one of our enforcers. Part of his job is to cancel out guys like Balon, to balance the game and to make our smaller players—and me—feel comfortable. It's all part of an unwritten code we've known since we were kids playing on ponds and backyard rinks. Justice was built into our game, not tacked on by a rule book that's grown bigger than the Yellow Pages.

Serge's good wishes notwithstanding we lost to Montreal in the next round. The Canadiens threw their speed at us and we had no answer for it. We planned to hit them but you can't hit what you can't catch. Every time I looked up, Montreal was on an odd-man rush: three on two, two on one. To make it worse, I helped cost us the series by giving up a couple of soft goals, including the first goal in Game 1 in Boston, a seventy-foot roller that hit a gouge in the ice and hopped over my stick and between my legs. We lost that game 5–4, and were swept 4–0 in the series. And don't think that a gouge in the ice absolves me. It doesn't. My high school coach, Hartley Lennon at St. Dominic's in Maine, told me, “In sports there's reality and there's
ultimate
reality.” In this case the reality was that the puck took a quirky and unpredictable bounce. Ultimate reality is that it ended up in the net and we lost by one goal. “In sports, ultimate reality is the only reality that counts,” Coach said.

We were two games into the Montreal series when the league announced it was fining Cam $5,000 for arguing with and bumping into the ref after the Balon incident. But that's beer money to Cam, not because he's pulling down $2.3 million a year but because Cameron Cabot Carter III is the grandson of the founder of Carter & Peabody, the private Boston-based mutual fund company. Cam is the only guy in the NHL who could make more money in the family business than he can playing hockey. Four years ago I asked him why he keeps playing. “You ever been to a business meeting?” he said. “It's five minutes, max, before someone says ‘synergy' and your eyes glaze over. The over-under on ‘paradigm' is seven minutes, and I'd bet the under. Besides, my family built the business. I made it in hockey on my own. Hockey's mine. A game belongs to the people who play it.”

“Try telling that to an owner,” I said. “They're the ones the game really belongs to. What do you do if the club trades your aging butt to Buffalo?”

“Son, say hello to the newest senior partner of Carter & Peabody,” he said. “And, Mr. Savard, I think it's time we rebalanced your portfolio.”

*   *   *

Last season—the season that changed our lives forever—I felt Cam was close to calling it a career. I had to envy the Camster, an All-Star who had serious money waiting for him no matter what happened on the ice. Not that I have to worry about where next month's condo payment is coming from. After I'd signed that last five-year deal with Boston I figured I'd need only one more contract to retire with enough money so that I wouldn't have to become a scout, a goalie coach, or, worse, one of those front-office coat holders. But I mostly wanted to keep playing because goaltending is the only job I know. And it's a good life. Except for the games.

The problem with being a goalie is that you can't win a game, you can only not lose it. You try to lose as few as you can before you get hurt or old or lose your job to someone younger and better. Goaltending, like life, is only a question of how much you eventually lose by.

Like a lot of goalies I'm a worrier, which means I spend most of the eight to nine months of the season—depending on how deep we go in the playoffs—in varying states of anxiety ranging from mild apprehension the day before a game to throwing-up scared forty-five minutes before face-off. That's one of the reasons Cam and I cooked up our little end-of-summer fishing trip. It's a chance to relax before life disintegrates into the chaos of a hockey season. We go to his parents' waterfront house in Falmouth on Cape Cod. It's a seven-bedroom gray-shingled Colonial with its own dock and a twin-inboard fishing boat.

It's always just Cam and me. Cam's wife, Tamara, stays home with their daughters—Lindsey, eight, and Caitlin, five. Cam's parents spend most of September in France. And the women I was going out with would've rated a fishing trip lower than a product recall on lip gloss.

It's the same routine every year. We spend the afternoon jigging for bluefish, come back to the house about six o'clock, clean one blue for dinner and two or three for the freezer, hit the shower, fire up the grill.

We eat on the back porch, which faces south overlooking Nantucket Sound and the distant shore of Martha's Vineyard. I like September. Days grow shorter and nights cooler. It's a meteorological overture to the hockey season. Cam says F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

And I like training camp. I'm not fighting for a job, preseason games don't mean anything, and I haven't begun to accumulate the welts, strains, and bruises that by midseason can erode my will to put my body in front of another frozen puck. I like getting back on the ice, catching up with friends and teammates. I even like breaking in new pads and gloves, especially a catch glove, although there's an irony to a catch glove in that the more flexible it becomes the less it protects my hand. But there's no such thing as pain-free goaltending, so I trade protection for saves and count it a good deal.

The way I feel after Labor Day makes me sorry for some of the summer people going home to boring jobs and to lives they feel trapped in. Or that they trapped themselves in because at some point they gave in to fear and did what they knew they could do—play it safe—instead of taking a chance on doing what they truly wanted to do. They call that “being realistic.” Hockey scares me, but I'd rather be scared than bored.

After dinner Cam breaks out the Cognac and we sit and watch the lights of the boats on Nantucket Sound. When we're fishing we keep the conversation light. We talk about the fish, the coming season, the rookies who'll be after our jobs, the schedule. We save the heavy stuff for after dinner. It was on the back porch three years ago that Cam and I first talked about Lisa's death.

*   *   *

Lisa and I were married four years. No kids. But we were planning to start a family at the end of the season when I knew I'd be signing another long-term deal. In March of that year Lisa went for a chest X-ray. She had a cough that had been bothering her for months. That's when they found the cancer. Lisa didn't smoke. But more than 15 percent of the people who get lung cancer don't smoke. Most of them are women.

By August the cancer was on the power play. One of the last times I saw Lisa was a Thursday night. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, alert and breathing oxygen through a plastic tube. We were half watching an early-season Thursday-night NFL game. Lisa's father had played football at Boston College and Lisa loved the game. On a first-and-goal from the eight-yard line the San Diego quarterback took the snap and spun to his left where he was supposed to hand the ball to the tailback. But the tailback ran the wrong play and sprinted out for a pass. “Busted play!” yelled the TV play-by-play guy.

The quarterback scrambled around, ducked under the grasp of a defensive end, sidestepped a linebacker, and, while on the run, threw across his body to a receiver in the back left corner of the end zone. Touchdown.

“And the Chargers made something out of a busted play, Gene,” the TV analyst said as if he were giving us an insight into quantum theory. That's when Lisa delivered the best sports metaphor I've ever heard.

“Life is a busted play,” she said.

A week later she was gone.

Lisa was right. Life
is
a busted play. Love too.

*   *   *

I met Lisa early in my junior year at the University of Vermont, where Cam and I played college hockey. The team was doing one of those end-of-practice skating drills that are tough for goalies because of the weight of our equipment. I'd put my gloves, stick, and mask on the back of the net to lighten my load. But an assistant coach, screwing around, dinged a slapshot off the post and into my left cheekbone and nose. Blood all over the place. I held a towel to the cut and skated to the dressing room, where Bobby Breyer, our trainer, undid my leg pads and skates. I was still wearing my “Vermont Hockey” practice shirt and pressing a bloody towel to my cheek when Bobby and I walked into the emergency room at Lake Champlain Medical Center. Lisa stood near the desk. The name on her uniform read “Lisa M. Quinn, R.N.—Oncology.” I didn't know what “oncology” meant. I found out later she was only working the ER to sub for a friend. Lisa was a cute kid with short black hair, an upturned nose, and big brown eyes. Midtwenties. Perky cheerleader type.

“What happened?” Lisa asked.

“Stopped a puck,” I said.

“Hey, that's more than you did against Harvard,” she said, laughing and holding out her hand. “You're J. P. Savard, right? I'm Lisa Quinn. And I'm kidding. I've seen you guys play. You've got a good team. But not last Saturday. What happened?”

“Couldn't handle Harvard's power play,” I said, and explained that Harvard used an unbrella power play, where one defenseman plays back near the blue line like a basketball point guard. “Then they put two forwards at the top of the circles and two more down low near the net. Guy at the top had a cannon. He'd blast it at me and the little guys down low would go for the tip-in or rebound. Seems every time we hit a guy near the net we got called for interference. They scored five goals on the power play, two of them during five-on-threes. Of course I didn't do anything that would remind anyone of a goaltender.”

Lisa laughed and hustled me into the ER. She stayed with me while a lady doctor put in the stitches, and then Lisa worked some administrative magic to get us to the front of the X-ray-room line so we could see if the cheekbone was broken. It wasn't. “Bad news. Not broken. Gotta face BC Saturday,” she said. I liked her attitude and blunt humor.

Lisa's father was a University of Vermont season ticket holder and he often took Lisa to the games. But he and Lisa's mother were Boston College alumni, so Lisa wasn't getting her usual ticket for that Saturday's sold-out game against number-three-in-the-nation BC.