The Final Period

You cannot take back a bad shift. The buzzer on it has already gone, and all you get is the next shift, and how you take it. It took me losing everything to learn what that means.

I had it all once. A spot near the top of the league, a wife who saw the whole of me and stayed anyway, a little girl who thought I hung the moon. And in the lowest, most frightened stretch of a dying career, on the road, half drunk and certain I was finished, I threw it away in one night I will spend the rest of my life paying for. Evangeline didn't scream. She just took our daughter and left, and rebuilt her life two thousand miles away, in a sun-blasted desert town where she runs the only sheet of ice for a hundred miles.

Now I'm here. Playing out the last season of my life for the Solace Gap Scorpions, a busload of has-beens and never-weres in the town where my ex-wife has made a home without me. I didn't come to win her back with a grand gesture. I came to show up. Every day. Changed. To be the father I failed to be, to earn a place at the edge of their lives, and to take every hard shift I spent years skating away from, all the way to the buzzer this time, whether it wins me anything or not.

She owes me nothing. Not forgiveness, not a second chance, not one inch. I know that better than anyone. But this is the final period, the last one I've got, in the game and out of it, and the final period is where you find out who a man actually is.