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Cam came into our dressing room after practice, dumped his gloves and helmet in his locker, then headed back out the door. I saw him take a right toward the rookies' dressing room. He told me later he went there to talk to Canfield. “I told him it was a good scrap. If they send him down all he has to do is take care of business for a season or two and he'll be in the Show. Maybe not here but somewhere. The kid can throw 'em.”

Quigley was right. The next morning the Mad Hatter shipped Davey to Providence, and later that season he traded him to Edmonton. Best break the kid ever got. He caught on with Edmonton and has been in the NHL ever since.

*   *   *

“Cameron Cabot Carter the Third, you look like someone hit you with a bag of shovels.” It was the deep rich voice of Faith McNeil coming from the foyer of Cam and Tam's house. “JP here?” she asked.

“In the living room,” Cam said but by then I was off the couch and headed for the foyer. What awaited me there was Faith McNeil wearing the Montreal Canadiens power play—Saint Laurent, Chanel, Givenchy, Tourneau, and Vuitton. The ponytail was gone and in its place was a hairstyle best described as early Katharine Hepburn. She looked like what she'd become—an alpha female.

“Hey, Faith, all your sweats in the wash?” I said, trying to set the tone and get in a preemptive shot.

“Along with your game, JP. I heard about the intrasquad,” she said. Faith won that exchange. We'd had our Black-versus-Gold intrasquad game the night before and I'd given up five goals playing only a period and a half.

I went to shake hands with her—I hate social hugging and kissing, it's insincere—but she grabbed my right hand and pulled me into a hug that included a head-on with the same breasts that used to make the block-lettered “
VERMONT
” on her game shirt look like a section of track for the Tilt-A-Whirl.

The Carters could afford as much household help as they wanted but they didn't want any. They were getting the meal themselves, so Tamara excused herself and went back to the kitchen and Cam went with her to make a couple of gin and tonics for Faith and me. As soon as they were gone Faith turned serious. “I heard about Lisa. I'm sorry,” she said. “You've had a tough time.”

I thanked her and said I heard she'd taken a hit herself what with the divorce.

“Not the same,” she said. “Pete and I made a choice. You and Lisa didn't. Besides, he was in love with someone else. Anyway, it worked out OK”—she hesitated a half beat—“securitywise.” I'd been around Cam's family long enough to know “security” was one of the upper-crust code words for serious wealth. Cam told me Faith cleared twenty mil when she sold her stock in the company she'd helped start.

It was here that I broke the first rule of goaltending—I committed myself too soon. “Maybe we could grab dinner some night and catch up,” I said as Cam entered the room with the drinks.

“I thought that's what tonight's for,” Faith said. “Grad school starts next week. And to tell you the truth, JP, I'm in a relationship. He's a cardiologist at Mass General. Between my classes and his job we won't get to spend much time together.” She took her gin and tonic from Cam and headed to the kitchen to see if she could help Tamara.

As Cam handed me my drink he let loose a long low whistle followed by the equally low rumble of an explosion. I knew what he meant. I'd just gone down like one of those Japanese fighter planes in the movie
Midway,
smoke and flame belching from the fuselage before it crashes into the Pacific.

Tam didn't need help so Faith returned to the living room.

Scrambling to recover, I asked her where she was going to grad school.

“Boston University. First year.”

“Business school?” I asked.

“Med school,” she said. I almost spewed my drink. Here I was doing the same thing I'd been doing since I was eight years old—putting my body between pucks and their intended destinations—and here was Faith McNeil, who'd built a business, made about ten times as much money as I had, and was now on the road to being a doctor.

I can handle beautiful women. And I'm OK with beautiful and smart. But hit me with an alpha female—beautiful, smart, sophisticated, successful, stylish, and rich—and my self-confidence goes farther south than Enron. I spent most of dinner stickhandling asparagus tips around my plate.

When Tamara and Cam started clearing away dishes Faith turned to me and said, “I hear Cam's been giving you a rough time.”

“Cam's worried that I don't date much, but to tell you the truth I don't want to,” I said.

“You know what you need, Jean Pierre?”

I said I sure didn't.

“A rehab start,” she said.

I laughed. A rehab start in baseball and sometimes in hockey happens when you're coming off an injury and your team sends you to its minor-league affiliate to get in a game or two before you come back to the bigs. The only bad thing about a rehab start is sometimes they don't recall you. They leave you in the minors.

“I know a lot of single women, JP. I can make sure you meet some of them. Dani, my personal shopper, would be perfect for you. She loves sports.”

Two weeks later Faith invited me to a private party at the Museum of Fine Arts and introduced me to Danica Purcell, a twenty-two-year-old looker who was lighter than a Macy's Parade balloon and whom I started dating almost immediately. It was nice to go out for a change. And Dani wasn't an alpha so I felt comfortable with her. Dani also liked sex almost as much as she liked her commissions from Saks and Bloomingdale's. I went out with Dani for three months before she dumped me for an Italian designer. No matter. By then I was back in circulation. It's not hard for a pro athlete to find agreeable women. Faith's rehab strategy worked. Except for one thing. I never came back from the minors. It was as if I kept dating the same woman over and over—midtwenties, good-looking, good job, killer clothes. Puck fucks but with taste and style. It wasn't their fault they weren't Lisa.

I was thinking of Lisa as I drove Boss Scags onto the Bourne Bridge, the westernmost of the two suspension bridges over the Cape Cod Canal. Driving over the Bourne Bridge is like taking off in a plane. Your car climbs the steep roadway while the land around you falls away until you're at the highest point of the bridge, the surging water of the canal below and the huge green scrub-pine expanse of Cape Cod stretched out before you. Twenty minutes after crossing the bridge I pulled the Ferrari up to Cam's parents' house. An hour later we were on the water over Horseshoe Shoals, which lies south of the Cape and north of Martha's Vineyard. Cam let the boat drift and we worked tube-and-worm jigs, sending the weighted lures to the bottom and retrieving them fast. We hooked up on our first try. Bluefish don't nibble. They hit hard and fight harder. Mine was ripping line off the reel. When I tightened the drag to slow him the line snapped. I turned to help Cam land his fish. I stuck the butt of my rod in one of the rod holders and put on a pair of gloves so I could grab the wire leader without cutting my hands. Cam worked his fish close to the stern and I reached over the transom, grabbed the leader, and pulled the bluefish into the boat. It was an eight-pounder. We threw him in a chest of ice. We always keep the first fish on the off chance we don't catch another.

“How'd you lose him?” Cam asked me as I rerigged my rod.

“Tightened the drag too much,” I said.

About a minute went by before Cam said: “Yeah, it's like that with kids and players; Set the drag too loose and you can't control 'em; set it too tight and you lose 'em. Got to set it just right.”

Hang around with Cam long enough and you're going to hear a few things worth writing down.

As usual, we were on the porch shortly after sundown, and—also as usual—Cam had something to say.

“I think we're down to our last shot, JP,” he said, pouring a couple of ounces of Cognac into two of his parents' Austrian-made crystal snifters.

“Your dad has a lot more Cognac where this came from,” I said.

“I don't mean the Cognac. I mean we're getting old. Our team's getting old. If we don't win a Cup this year I don't think we're going to win one. Getting close to last call,
mon ami,
” he said.

“Cam, we're thirty-one. You've got what? Two years left on your contract? I'll probably get one more five-year deal. We're still making it into the All-Star Game. We've got a few more kicks at the can.”

“I know, but I'm getting tired, JP. Tired of coaches telling me I have to be in my hotel room by midnight, of fighting guys I don't dislike—and don't think Lindsey isn't starting to notice that—and having no-talent guys like the Mad Hatter telling me what to do all the time. Where to be and what time to be there.”

“At least you have a soft spot to land,” I said, sounding a little jealous, which I was. Trying to soften that, I told him that no matter what happened he'd had a hell of a run.

“The run's not over, Jean Pierre,” he said. I didn't say anything, because when Cam uses my full name instead of calling me JP it means there's more coming. Sort of like when your parents called you by your first, middle, and last name. Nothing good ever happened after my mother or grandmother started a sentence with “Jean Pierre Lucien Savard…”

“The only thing left that I really want to do,” he said, “is get my name on the Stanley Cup.”

“You and six hundred and fifty other guys on thirty teams,” I said.

“Yeah, every team wants the Cup, but there are only five or six teams that are legitimate contenders.”

“Cup or no Cup, we've had great careers.”

“But winning a Cup defines a career.
Not
winning one also defines a career. The best thing about winning the Cup is that they engrave your name on it. It's forever, JP. Winning the Cup is immortality.”

“At least that's an immortality I can believe in,” I said. We raised our glasses and moved to clink them together. But I misjudged the distance. I hit Cam's glass too hard, shattering my snifter and sending shards of glass and a dribble of Cognac onto the floor.

Two

It was raining as I drove to Cam's house on Beacon Hill to pick him up for our preseason game against the New York Islanders at Boston Garden. The arena is the second Boston Garden. The original building closed in 1995 but everyone calls the new place the Garden, which in Boston they pronounce “GAH-den.” I live less than a mile from Cam in a condo on Marlborough Street, a place I bought after I sold the house Lisa and I owned.

In nice weather Cam and I walk to the rink. We go up the west side of Beacon Hill, then down the north side to the Garden. The north slope was Boston's red-light district in Colonial days. Now when we walk past the statehouse on top of the hill Cam says, “The whores moved uptown.”

*   *   *

Lindsey—Cam and Tamara's eight-year-old—answered the door. “Hi, Mr. Savard,” she said. “Daddy said he'd be down in a minute. I like your car.”

“Thanks, Lindsey. How you doing?”

“Fine. I hope you and Daddy win tonight.”

“Thanks.”

“And I hope you don't let in any of those really long shots. Like remember against Montreal?” she said.

“Me, too,” I said.

“You remember that really, really, REALLY long one?”

“Hard to forget.”

“The one that just rolled along the ice?”

“Just rolled along,” I said.

“I think I would have stopped that one,” Lindsey said, bending over and sweeping aside an imaginary puck with her imaginary stick.

“Probably would have,” I said.

“Maybe even Caitlin would have stopped it.”

“Caitlin's only five,” I said.

“But she's almost six and she's in Learn-to-Skate.”

“Where is Caitlin?” I asked but Lindsey ignored the question.

“How did that puck ever get into the net?”

“Bad bounce,” I said.

“I hope you won't let it happen again.”

I said I'd try not to.

“Hey, Linds, Mom wants to see you,” Cam said, bounding down the front stairs.
“Bonjour,
Jean Pierre.
Comment ça va, eh?”
That's Cam's way of needling me about my being the only French-Canadian player he knows who can't speak French. I spoke French as a child but I lost the language when Mom and I moved to Maine. Lewiston is a partly Francophone city but I went to schools where they spoke English.

“So how's it going with Julie the Account Exec?” Cam asked as he got in the car.

“You're one behind. It's Sheri the Equestrienne. She teaches at a riding academy in Weston.”

“A horsewoman? How'd you meet her?”

“The Ferrari,” I said. “Sheri saw me hand the keys to the valet at Sonsie. It was love at first sight.” Sonsie is a swank Newbury Street bar and restaurant where people go to be seen or just to say they've been there.

“So we're into boots and riding crops, are we?” Cam said.

“She takes off the spurs. Too tough on the sheets.”

“She go to the whip much?”

“Only in the stretch,” I said. “She sure likes to be on top.”

“You OK with that?”

“Cam, Sheri the Equestrienne could ride a guy to a win in the Breeders' Cup,” I said, nosing Boss Scags through the rain-slicked streets toward the Garden's underground garage.

I could afford to be loose. Reginald “Rinky” Higgins, our backup goalie, was starting against the Islanders. Packy was saving me for our final two exhibition games. In the greatest preseason scheduling I'd seen in nine seasons, we were playing a Thursday-night game against the New York Rangers at their training camp at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and then two nights later we'd play Montreal in Quebec City, one of the greatest restaurant towns in North America. The best part was the itinerary. We'd fly to Burlington on Wednesday—the day before the game—so we'd get a free night on the town. After Thursday's game we'd bus to Quebec, where we'd stay at the Château Frontenac, a castle on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River. We'd have Friday night to enjoy Quebec before we played the Canadiens on Saturday.