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A team can dress twenty players for a game and we usually carry twenty-five on our roster. But there were only a half dozen guys who—with Cam, Quig, and me—would determine how far we'd go.

Phil “Flipside” Palmer is Cam's partner on defense. Flipside is our music expert, a human discography of rock, rap, jazz, pop, classical, and country. Only guy in the world besides the Kingsmen who knows the words to “Louie Louie.” One day last season Takagi “Taki” Yamamura, a Japanese-Canadian and our second-line center, came into the room and said, “Hey, Flipper, betcha don't know the only Japanese song by a Japanese singer to chart in the U.S. Top Forty.” Without even looking up from the stick he was taping, Flipside said, “‘Sukiyaki' by the late Kyu Sakamoto, 1963. Covered in the eighties by A Taste of Honey.” You don't screw around with Flipside.

Bruno Govoni is our number three defenseman and a great penalty killer, which is a good thing because, otherwise, he's an immature punk. Bruno is a strip club and porn fan. The ring tone on his cell phone isn't a ring at all but the recorded orgasmic moanings of Canadian porn star Loretta “Lash” LaRue. Of course Cam and I know his phone number and dial it at strategic moments. Like last season when his phone went off—so to speak—during our meeting with the Sisters of Charity about a hospital fund-raiser. “Whoa. Get back, Loretta,” Bruno said, taking out his phone and shutting off Loretta midmoan. A couple of nuns smiled.

Our first-line center and top scorer is Jean-Baptiste “JB” Desjardin. JB will score forty to fifty goals a year and get close to a hundred points. He'll also irritate most of the English-Canadian guys on the team because he's an outspoken separatist. JB thinks Quebec should separate from the rest of Canada and form a new French-speaking country. “Hard to build a national economy on doughnut shops and chain-saw repair,” Cam tells him just to piss him off.

Jean-Baptiste's right winger is Luther Brown, an African-Canadian from Niagara Falls, Ontario. Luther almost always has his headphones on. For his first three seasons on the team I figured he was listening to Dr. Dre or Ludacris or various rappers who sing about hos and bitches and going down to the candy store and other lyrics you can't play at the junior prom or in pregame warmup. One day last season when he was taking off the headphones before practice I asked Luther whom he was listening to.

“Count Basie,” he said.

Rex Conway, another of our forwards, is a combination shit disturber and Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Rex could score five goals in a game but he wouldn't get on TV because every producer knows they'd blow the start of the ten o'clock news while Rex talked about how he owed his goals “to my personal relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” just as if it were Jesus and not JB and Luther who'd been feeding him the puck all night.

Taki Yamamura, who can play wing as well as center, is the fastest skater in the league but not even the best athlete in his own family because that has to be his wife, Su, a principal dancer with the Boston Ballet. Taki brought some of us to the opening of
The Nutcracker
last November. We had one of those eight-seat private boxes like Abe Lincoln got himself shot in. At intermission—or “halftime” as Kevin Quigley called it—we hit the champagne pretty hard. Had a couple of glasses in the lobby and brought a tray of them back to our box. So when Su, as the Dew Drop Fairy, did a beautiful
grande jete
—a leap in which she hung in the air like Kobe Bryant—we clapped and whistled. Later we booed the army of mice and Quigley threw a plastic champagne glass at the Rat King. Taki told us the next day that Su said if he ever brought us to the ballet again she'd do things to him that would make Iwo Jima look like a Boy Scout jamboree.

We'll have a dozen other guys shuttling up and down from Providence. We call them the Black Aces. Packy calls them spare parts. The Mad Hatter calls them flotsam and jetsam.

*   *   *

At dinner with Cam on the night before our preseason game with the Rangers, I was set to plunge a dessert fork into the Inn at Essex's killer crème brûlée when Cam said, “We really gotta have it between the pipes this season, JP.”

“What the hell have you had for the last nine years?” I said, miffed that Cam seemed to have forgotten that I consistently put up good numbers and usually pass up a potential three-day midseason vacation and sex rodeo with a Sheri the Equestrienne by getting myself picked for the All-Star Game. The only mark on my rap sheet is that three or four times a year I'll let in a long one.

“This can be a special year, JP. Gotta stay dialed. Can't let in one of those rollers like against Montreal.”

I looked up from the crème brûlée. “You son of a bitch you heard everything Lindsey said.”

Cam was chuckling now.

“Your own daughter is tuning me up and you let her.”

“What'd you want me to do? Cross-check her into the living room? Besides”—he was laughing now—“she was right.”

“It was one stinkin' goal.”

“Cost us the game.”

“It was a best-of-seven series for Christ's sake, Cam.”

“Cost us home ice.”

“Think of all the saves I made.”

“That goal was like letting in a sectional sofa.”

“I'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.

“Grab 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.

“You know why I pulled you?” Coach asked me after the game.

“Because I let in a bad goal,” I said.

“Guess again.”

“Because I smashed my stick?”

“You're getting close,” Coach said. “I pulled you because you showed how much you were hurt. JP, in the goaltending business you never—ever—show how much you're hurt. Get up, shut up, and stop the next shot.”

*   *   *

About a half hour after our exhibition win over the Rangers I was walking across the rink parking lot to our bus when Marco Indinacci caught up with me. “Good game, Ace, except for that last goal,” he said. “Hey, you asked me when I was going to retire,” Marco said. “What about you? When you going to hang up the tools of ignorance?”

“Four or five seasons,” I said. “One more contract.”

“Don't stay too long, JP,” my old coach said. “There aren't many happy endings in the NHL.”

*   *   *

It was after 2 a.m. when the bus pulled up to the Château Frontenac. Packy told us we had practice at Le Colisee from eleven to noon.

I'm an early riser, which is a good thing if you want to get one of the few copies of the
Toronto Globe and Mail
at the Frontenac's front desk. I think breakfast with the sports section is one of life's minor pleasures. I was reading an NHL Notes column while finishing my coffee when I saw the news that, in the aftermath of the Rangers' loss to us, New York had called up my old UVM teammate Gaston Deveau. I knew most NHL GMs thought Deveau was too small—he's about five feet nine, 160 pounds—to play in the the Show. So Gaston went overseas and for six seasons tore up Europe like the plague. The Rangers signed him two years ago but buried him in the minors. I was happy he'd get his first shot at the bigs.

*   *   *

We coasted through practice. Guys were more interested in what restaurants and clubs they'd hit than in Packy's penalty-kill and power-play drills. Bruno Govoni tried to round up a party to hit a suburban strip club. He asked Rex Conway to go but our Christian right winger said he wasn't a big fan of strip clubs because, as Rex put it, “Like Moses ye shall see the Promised Land but ye shall not enter.” About once a year Rex gets off a good line. I figured that would about do it for the season.

*   *   *

You'd need three weeks to hit all the great restaurants in Quebec City. Some of the guys went to Le Continental or Aux Anciens Canadiens, both across the street from the Frontenac. But Cam and I had been to those places in our early days when Quebec City had an NHL team, the Nordiques. That team moved to Denver, where it's now the Colorado Avalanche. I wanted to try someplace new, so Cam, Luther Brown, and I went to Le Saint-Amour on rue Ste-Ursule, also an easy walk from the hotel. I had the caribou steak grilled with wild berries and served with poached pears in red wine. Cam ordered a château-bottled Bordeaux—
“Château de Deuxième Hypothèque,”
Cam said to the waiter while pointing to what must have been the most expensive wine on the list. The waiter laughed. “Château de Second Mortgage,” Cam translated for us. He wasn't kidding. Our bill looked like the tote board at Saratoga. Cam paid.

Luther and I like jazz, so I suggested we catch the first set at L'Emprise, a jazz bar in the Hotel Clarendon. Cam was surprised there was no cover charge or minimum. He laughed at the sign on the door:
“Consumption Obligatoire.”

We got the last three seats at the narrow bar that borders three sides of the small stage. The group that night was the Quintette Joelle Clarisse. The woman I assumed was Joelle—a striking young blonde in a black sheath dress—was the vocalist, and four young guys were on piano, drums, bass, and tenor sax.

Joelle said a few words in French—she lost me after
“Bon soir, mesdames et messieurs…”
—and began a set sung mostly in French but with one song, “Maybe You'll Be There,” in English and another, “Bésame Mucho,” in Portuguese. The group was good but by no means memorable. Or not until the end of the set, after a guy at the bar handed Joelle a slip of paper. She read it, smiled, turned to the band, and said, “Summertime.”

I nudged Cam. “They're playing your song,” I said, hitting him with a quick lyric—“Your daddy's rich and your mama's good-lookin'…” Cam flipped me off. Luther laughed.

From the first notes and the woman's full, clear, sultry “Summertime…” the song ached with sensuality. On the woman's left the sax player, eyes closed, swayed back and forth losing himself in his instrument, playing with passion and an almost erotic abandon. Most people stopped drinking and the two waiters put down their trays. Halfway through the song the woman turned to the saxophone player—the bass and piano had receded now and the drummer worked softly with the brushes—and it was just the two of them wrapped in the music. Singing and playing to each other. They had to be lovers, I thought. Or to have been lovers once and now the music was all they had left. When the song ended, the sax player leaned back and looked at the ceiling. The woman dropped her head briefly. Then, turning away from the sax player, she said something and the group segued into a break with “Take the A Train.” That's when the applause began and the people stood.