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“Salvatore Bono and Cherilyn LaPiere,” said Flipper, who then undid his seat belt, stood up, and pretended to swat away a basketball while he yelled at Mike: “Get that stuff OUTTA here, Emerson.” I think Flipside did that only to embarrass Mike and keep him from asking more questions.

*   *   *

Fans have a romantic view of a road trip. They think it's a group vacation where someone else pays the bills. It isn't. I've gone to Buffalo forty times and still haven't been to Niagara Falls. Baseball players go to a city and stay three or four days. Hockey players are in and out. Here's our schedule for the day after we arrive in Minneapolis: Bus from the hotel to the rink, light skate, bus back to the hotel, have a team lunch and meeting, go to our rooms and try to nap, bus back to the rink and play the Wild. Then we can either bus to the hotel for a postgame meal or go out on our own, which is what Cam and I will do. Wednesday morning we bus to a suburban rink for a midmorning practice, then bus to the airport for our flight to San Jose. But I'm explaining, not complaining. When we fly over a city and I see all those office buildings containing all those cubicles I think of what life would be like working nine to five Monday through Friday. I know I'm lucky to do what I do.

At first it looked as though the middle seat between Kevin Quigley and me might go empty. No such luck. Just before the plane pulled away from the gate a fortyish-looking woman in a black pantsuit and white oxford shirt scrambled down the aisle and settled into 16-B. She began flipping through a folder and pulled out a brochure titled
Understanding the Angry Child
. With her big black-rimmed glasses and blond hair pulled back and fastened with a clip that looked like a leghold trap, she had the classic librarian look, the one giving rise to the fantasy that—fortyish or not—if you took off those glasses and freed her hair from the leghold trap you just might uncork a sexual Vesuvius quaking on the brink of long-supressed eruption. But I have a policy about talking to people on planes. I don't do it. Not unless I know them. There's too much risk that the person will be in sales or academia and will bore me into a tongue-lolling stupor. But Ms. Vesuvius must have overheard some of us talking and figured out who we were. Sort of. About an hour out of Boston she turned to me and said: “Are you people the Red Sox?”

“No, ma'am. We're the Bruins. A hockey team,” I said, observing another of my in-flight survival rules, namely that any attractive woman who speaks to me on a plane will be addressed—at least at first—as “ma'am.” Pretty women aren't used to being called “ma'am.” It handcuffs them. Puts them down 0–1 in the count. They feel vaguely offended but they can't say anything because, on the surface, it looks as though I'm just being polite.

She said she was a social worker with the Archdiocese of Boston's Catholic Charities and was on her way to a national conference in Minneapolis. Her name was Nan O'Brien and she ran what she called “a family-preservation program” that tried to help dysfunctional families and prevent child abuse and neglect.

We were making our descent into Minny when Nan O'Brien gave me her business card:

Nancy C. O'Brien—LICSW

DIRECTOR

Catholic Charities Family Preservation

I asked her what the LICSW stood for. “Licensed independent clinical social worker,” she said. Then she asked me if I could donate some equipment to her program's annual fund-raising auction. “Maybe some autographed sticks and balls.”

“Pucks,” I said. “We're a hockey team. We use pucks.”

“Oh, of course. Sticks and pucks then?”

I said I'd give her a couple of game-used goalie sticks and a few pucks.

“I'll get you a stick from everyone on the team,” said Quigley in a voice suggesting that any player who didn't give Kevin an autographed stick might be endangering his health and general well-being. Nan gave Kev her business card.

*   *   *

The trip was a nightmare. We lost 2–1 to Minnesota and 3–2 to San Jose. I played both games. Rinky Higgins got his first start of the season in Phoenix and he threw thirty-seven saves at the Coyotes but we lost 1–0. Whenever I watch a game from the bench I'm surprised at the speed and violence. When I see the game from the goal crease I'm focused on the puck, the whole play is in front of me, and the players are just colorful swirling chess pieces whose movements I have to keep track of. But when I sit on the bench the game moves horizontally and speed is more obvious. Once or twice a game a player will get checked into the boards in front of me, the force of the collision shaking the bench and making me wonder how a skater—a nongoalie—can take that kind of pounding for eighty to a hundred games a year. Cam tried to explain it to me once: “There's an anesthesia that goes with playing,” he said. “Mostly you only hurt after the game.”

I was back in goal in Anaheim, where we lost 4–1.

We had an off night in Nashville and Cam thought it'd be a good idea if we forgot our 0–4 road record and took in some country music. During a break by the band—the all-girl Cotton-Eyed Jo—Cam and I went to play the jukebox. I remember when you could hear a song on a jukebox for twenty-five cents. This machine wanted fives, tens, or twenties. “Someday it'll cost you ten shares of Google just to hear a little Alan Jackson,” Cam said as the machine inhaled his ten and he punched up some Gretchen Wilson, Tim McGraw, and the Dixie Chicks. The best part of the night was watching Lynne Abbott, an easterner, outdance half of the Stetson-hatted, I-was-country-when-country-wasn't-cool, phony cowboys in the joint. Some of them tried to hit on her but she always slipped back to the safety of our table. The team had an 11:30 curfew (is that demeaning or what?) and it sure looked like there were a lot of unhappy counterfeit cowboys when Lynne decided she'd be safer walking back to the hotel with us than staying in the honky tonk. Surrounded by players Lynne looked like a twelve-meter yacht in a convoy of destroyers.

We beat Nashville 2–1 and headed into Toronto an abysmal 1–4 on the trip and 3–5 for the season. We had a late-morning practice at the Air Canada Centre, the new rink the Leafs moved into when they left Maple Leaf Gardens a few years ago. We were in the dressing room about ten minutes before practice when Packy walked in and right away one of our rookies, Billy Shannon, started yapping. “Gotta have this one tonight, guys.… Gotta bring it.… Little sandpaper in the game…” Billy shut up as soon as Packy was out of earshot in the trainer's room.

“Hey, rook, shut the fuck up. You haven't hit anyone or blocked a shot in three games,” Flipside said.

Flipper was right. All that chatter was fake hustle. Not even the coaches are fooled by it. But I don't like hearing that tone between teammates. That's what losing does.

We had a free afternoon, so after lunch I joined Cam on a short walk from the hotel to the Hockey Hall of Fame on Yonge Street.

We entered the hall through a food court in an ultramodern office-and-shopping complex. Once inside it was like stepping back in time not only because of the exhibits and old photos of players without helmets but because the Hall of Fame is located in what was a branch of the Bank of Montreal built in 1885. The building's weathered stone exterior and polished oak paneling are a sharp nostalgic contrast to the glass-and-steel architecture of modern Toronto.

We headed straight for the hall's sanctum sanctorum—as my religion teacher at St. Dom's would've called it—the old bank vault on the second floor, home of the Stanley Cup. There was the Cup itself, a gleaming silver bowl atop a column of concentric silver bands, each glittering with the engraved names of former winners. Display cases around the room held the older engraved bands that had to be taken off so the trophy wouldn't stand too high. Some of the greatest names in hockey are on that Cup: Fred “Cyclone” Taylor, Maurice Richard, Jean Beliveau, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux. And Georges Vezina, a Montreal Canadiens goalie from the twenties who had my all-time favorite sports nickname, the Chicoutimi Cucumber. The writers called him that because he was from Chicoutimi and was so cool in net. But it might also be worth noting that Vezina fathered twenty-two children. His wife, Marie-Stella Vezina, should have her name on a trophy. Each year the Vezina Trophy goes to the best goalie in the NHL as voted by the general managers. I've been runner-up three times. I'd like to win it. But I'd rather win the Stanley Cup.

While I walked around reading names Cam stood and stared at the Cup as if it were the Holy Grail or the Hope Diamond. “Money can't buy that,” he said. “Which is why it's worth winning.”

If you win the Cup you get to keep it for a day. A few years ago when Dallas won the Cup a defenseman, Penrose Holiday, put his five-week-old infant son in the bowl for what he thought would be a cutesy nude photo for the family's Christmas card. Of course the kid did what babies do. Then he did the other thing babies do. You might want to remember that the next time you see a player swigging Dom Pérignon out of that bowl.

“I think it's this season or never,” Cam said more to himself than to me.

“It'll be never if we don't get some scoring,” I said. The truth was our defense and goaltending had been solid after opening night but only J.-B. Desjardin and Taki Yamamura were scoring with any consistency.

“Pisses you off that the Mad Hatter was too cheap to get into the free-agent market and get us a scorer or two,” Cam said.

“It's not just the Hatter,” I said. “It's Gabe's money.” Gabe Vogel has owned the Bruins for twenty years. We're part of a worldwide media empire based mainly on cable TV.

“In Gabe's eyes we're just programming,” Cam said. Vogel is listed annually in
Forbes
magazine as one of the four hundred richest people in the world. Word around the league and among our fans is that his mandate to the Mad Hatter is to build a competitive team but one not quite competitive enough to win the Stanley Cup and cost Gabe a whole lot of money in player contracts. I think Madison Hattigan does what he's told. We're always $3 million or $4 million under the cap. And if the rumors about Hattigan getting a percentage of that money are true, then the Mad Hatter is pocketing $300,000 to $400,000 every season.

I doubt Gabe Vogel would know a puck from a whoopee pie. He hardly ever comes to our games and when he does he sits in his luxury suite. I've seen him in our dressing room only once and that was last season after we were eliminated by Montreal in the playoffs. He looked relieved.

I left Cam staring at the Stanley Cup while I wandered downstairs to an exhibit that shows the evolution of the goalie mask. It's hard to believe but for more than half a century goalies didn't wear masks. There had been a few unsuccessful experiments with goalie masks but it wasn't until November 1, 1959, that Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante put on a mask in an NHL game and changed hockey forever. In the first period of a game against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden, Plante came out of his net and checked the Rangers' Andy Bathgate behind the Montreal goal. On his next shift Bathgate—who had one of the hardest shots in the league—deliberately put a backhander into Plante's face, smashing the goalie's left cheekbone and slicing the side of his nose. In those days team's didn't carry backup goalies. If Plante hadn't returned to the game the Canadiens would've been forced to use the Rangers' practice goalie, an amateur who was one of the Garden's electricians. Plante had been practicing with a mask of his own design but his coach, Toe Blake, had refused to let him wear it in a game. Blake said it blocked the goalie's vision at his feet and, worse, was a tacit admission of fear. “If I jump out of an airplane without a parachute does that make me brave?” Plante asked his coach. Realizing the leverage he had, Plante made it a condition of his returning to play that he be allowed to wear the mask. Blake caved. Plante wore the mask and Montreal won the game. And the next game. And the one after that. And the Stanley Cup, their fifth in a row. Plante's invention didn't only prevent injuries. It saved lives. Anyone who ever plays goal owes something to Jacques Plante, the most important goaltender of all time. No him, no me, I thought.

*   *   *

During dinner at Giovanni's in Toronto's Little Italy I asked Cam what he'd do if he had the Cup for a day. “I'd have to take it to the Carter & Peabody offices because it'd net the company a zillion dollars' worth of publicity,” he said. “But what I'd
like
to do is take it back to Vermont. Haul it into our old rink and let Indinacci and everybody get their picture taken with it.”

I said I'd bring it home to my mother and grandmother. Display it at St. Dom's High School and maybe at my grammar school. “I'd try not to let a politician get within a five-iron of it,” I said.

“I don't remember seeing your mom on opening night. She come down?”

“Couldn't. Said she didn't want to leave my grandmother alone. She's seventy-eight and her health's slipping. I invited them for Thanksgiving. Told Mom I'd send a car for them and hire someone to look after Mammam so my mother can get to our Friday-afternoon game.”

*   *   *

The next night we lost 2–0 to the Leafs to close out one of the worst road trips since Lee went to Gettysburg. It was the second time in nine games we were shut out. The only good thing was that Flipside apparently got through to Billy Shannon. The rook had three hits and blocked a shot. Unfortunately he tried to block another shot in the third period. That one ended up in our net. It was a dumb rookie play. One of their shooters was about twenty feet away to my left when Shannon slid out at him pads-first. The puck ticked off of Billy's leg and over my shoulder into the net. The first thing I wanted to do was yell at Billy. Or point to him and show him up the way I've seen a lot of quarterbacks show up receivers who run the wrong routes or pitchers show up fielders who make errors. But that's not part of the hockey culture. We don't show up a teammate. Ever. We need each other too much.