They call this city “the graveyard.” a place to where former hockey stars who are past their prime get traded, where their once-mighty flame fizzles out in a few apathetic paragraphs in the back of the sports section. Even worse, this is where any pretensions to legendary status are beaten down to nothing with every successive loss.

 I used to live my dream. I was the starting goalie for the team of the city I grew up in, the Thunder Bay Mounties, and I backstopped us all the way to the Cup. I did it twice more in four years, and throughout that time my name was on the lips of every man, woman, and child in Canada. But after we fizzled out in the first round of the playoffs the season after our third Cup win, the owner lost his nerve and fired the GM and coaching staff. Before I knew it I was packing my bags for the American Southwest.

 I will never be able to fully purge the feeling that firmly lodged itself in the deepest part of my gut when I heard I had been traded. The new GM called a meeting on his first day on the job, and he gave a few other players their marching orders first:  Gradicek, former rookie of the year who had three consecutive hundred-point seasons, went to California. Vadislav, a defensemen whose hits sent a shockwave rolling across the entire span of the glass, went to the expansion team in the American north. Hollingvist, the playmaker who had set up so many great goals and was almost psychic with his no-look passes, went to New England. They all left in silence, exchanging glances that said a thousand goodbyes and best wishes, and shared in a split second the memories, heartbreaks, and triumphs that, in a world free of the salary-dumping owners and impatient GMs, would keep teams like ours united until the players themselves knew it was time to yield to the next generation.

 I was watching the doorway through which they left when my name was called. It was such a shock to hear my name that I didn’t even acknowledge it at first. I was still staring at the door, trying to blink away the tears that kept coming as I imagined my former teammates, all in their thirties, fading away into anonymity, our rungs on the Cup moving up and up through the years and finally being taken off as teams replaced us. No place in the Hall, no retired jerseys fluttering in the arena rafters, our chances at immortality all but ruined because we were being traded away to obscurity at our primes. The shock only intensified when my name was immediately followed by “you’re being traded to the Dust Devils.”

 That was it from Levine, the bastard. No “thanks for the Cups,” no “thanks for breaking all those records,” no “thanks for taking a pay cut that season so we could bring in Tredeaux.” Just the news that I was being traded, like livestock. Players groaned in sympathy. It came to me in a rush; in one week my wife would have to quit her job that she’d had for ten years, my kids would have to leave their friends and their safe, successful schools, and we would have to leave the house my family had lived in for four generations, with its immaculate sheet of ice in the backyard where I honed my skills before I could even stand upright. We were moving to a city that the educated, ostensibly intelligent men who ran the league thought could embrace and appreciate the game of hockey, even though the mercury never ventured below sixty degrees. And those same men, who seemed to be on a mission from God to dilute our beautiful, intricate game and spread it thin across a nation obsessed with so many other things than hockey, all the way down to the tropical coastlines and parched deserts that hadn’t seen a piece of ice larger than a snow cone since the last Ice Age—those men were dead wrong.

 I aged five years that day, when I stepped off the plane and everything around me was undulating in

 I cursed everything that day, the worst day of my life, that abominable day when we moved into our apartment. I cursed myself for not being good enough to stay in Ontario. I cursed the GM, of course. I cursed the owner for bringing in the GM, and I cursed the game as a whole for doing this to me. As a kid, I was smart, polite and motivated, and I could have been anything other than an athlete, and on that day I would have changed everything, would have erased the Cups and the awards and the endless legions of cheering fans that so faithfully crammed into the arena every game night to chant my name and sing the praises of my team, just so that I didn’t have to uproot my family from what was a perfect life and move down to this crime-riddled, perpetually sweltering anomaly of a town in a desert that was otherwise void of life. I cursed as the bones in my back tried their best to break free from each other as I dragged the furniture up the stairs. I cursed as the slick coat of sweat grew thicker and thicker over every square centimeter of my body and was diverted by miniscule canyon on the bridge of my nose directly into my left eye. But I reserved the best, most vulgar and outraged imprecations for the moment when I realized that the shoddy, undoubtedly refurbished air conditioner that kept our “luxury” apartment at temperatures on the verge of sustaining human life died in a pitiful display of leaking coolant and smoke.

 “I’m sorry about that, sir,” the obviously disinterested lady at the front desk said when I called to report the broken unit. “We’ll have someone out there in the next day or two. What was your name again?”

 As awful as it is to feel anger, it’s even worse to do so because of helplessness and outright disbelief. That overwhelming synergy is what drives men to do horrible things. My voice became weak and strained. “You don’t know who I am?”

 “Nope, sure don’t,” she said with the same amount of disinterest, but added impatience.

 “Sean Gravier?”

 “Who?”

 “The goaltender for the Dust Devils?” I never thought, not even in the worst of my nightmares, that I would ever have to introduce myself that way.

 “Are they a baseball team?”

 “The Dust Devils hockey team, the professional hockey team that plays one mile down the road from this hellhole of an apartment.”

 “Okay, whatever you say. How do you spell your name again?”

 “And what the hell do you mean two days?” In Canada, if I called anyone anywhere and told them I needed something, if I just needed some hot sauce for my chicken sandwich, within five minutes there would be a Canadian Army paratrooper touching down in my front yard cradling a bottle of Tabasco, or a mountie at my door, eyes urgent and mouth curled in a gleeful smile, with a crate of Jim’s Devil Blood. My whole body was shaking. I was completely broken. “It’s ninety-eight degrees outside, I have two kids and

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