the thermostat is already showing eighty degrees! Two days? We’re going to die in here. Dead, dead with vultures circling over Apartment 100C, do you hear?”

 “There’s a hotel down the road if you need different accommodations while you’re waiting.”

 I barely managed to keep a desperate grip on the crumbled remnants of my composure as I gave her my information. I turned to my family, bunched up behind me and staring with their hurt yet forgiving faces that weakened me even further. “We’re staying in a hotel until they fix the air conditioner. Everyone pack a suitcase,” I said, trying feebly to imitate some fearless leader and keep their confidence somewhere higher than mine.

 We unpacked clothes from the boxes and packed them into suitcases. Our sweat was dripping everywhere; we gave up trying to wipe it off. It dribbled off of our bodies and soaked the carpet. We got in our shambling rental car (no time to go look for another car to buy) and drove down to the hotel I recognized from my rare trips here on away games. I don’t know how I managed to keep from breaking down right there in front of my wife and kids. Maybe I kept my misery in check by finding the humor in the situation as I was staring at that hotel, I honestly don’t remember. I tried to cram some cheerfulness into my demeanor.

 “Well, I know for a fact the air conditioners work here,” I said with a weak smile, as I faintly recalled myself and my teammates sweating in the seventy-degree December night, trying to figure out how the hell people survived in this wretched climate.

 We found no vacancy there or anywhere else in the downtown area, and then we drove around the outskirts for another hour through an endless series of identical intersections trying to find a vacant room, the car’s air conditioner was straining to keep us all at ninety-eight point six degrees. We finally found a room in an ancient, nondescript hotel in a part of town I don’t care to recall. No one said a word as we dejectedly unloaded our bags and then shuffled down the sidewalk to one of the ubiquitous chain burger pits and choked down cold, rubbery fries and sandwiches completely devoid of anything satisfying.

 The part where my memory is a bit clearer was the moment when I stepped in the shower with its ominous brown and black spots and streaks scattered on the manila surfaces and was greeted with a slow trickle of tepid water that listlessly fell directly into the drain beneath me. That was when I, Sean Gravier, the man who had held the Cup three times in front of innumerable screaming, elated fans, whose name was at one point destined to resonate in the discussions of great hockey players for decades to come, sat down in a moldy basin in front of a pathetic dribble of water and blubbered like a disappointed child at Christmas. I was exhausted in every conceivable aspect, right down to the pores that had produced more sweat in twelve hours than in my whole life before that day combined.

 I would be dishonest if I said things didn’t get better after that day. You know what they say about hitting rock bottom. But I never again felt as potent, as virile, as immortal as I did back in Canada, where I was a demigod, a legend to be. I remember opening the paper (appropriately named The Sun) the next day in the hotel lobby out of curiosity, just to see where hockey and I ranked in the grand scheme of things down amongst the cacti and kangaroo rats. See, anywhere in Canada, there could be a nuclear war that just started, or an assassination of a high-ranking government official in an industrialized nation, but these would cede the front-page headline to the arrival of Sean Gravier, three-time Cup winning goalie. I wasn’t so disappointed to see that this wasn’t the case in my new home. I could understand that in a non-traditional hockey market, the fact that House Republicans were yet again accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy in lobbying reform was of more importance.

 I hopefully tossed aside the front section of the paper and shuffled through to sports. I could also understand football taking top honors on the sports page. No big deal, I thought, turning the page over to see where I would fall on page two—nothing about hockey there either, just basketball. Another article about baseball spilled over onto the third page. High school football claimed page four as its own. Sure, sure. I became more impatient, scanning headlines and first sentences for my name or my new team’s name. I saw nothing, nothing at all, not even on the next-to-the-last page. The back page was reserved for all-state high school athletes. I threw the paper down on the floor, lowered my head, and took a deep breath. Local news, I thought. I bet it made local news. I picked up section B and skimmed through it quickly—nothing, nothing about sports there. No photos, no headlines, nothing. I guess that’s what a sports section is for. I snatched up the sports section again, desperately flinging the pages as I tried to find some acknowledgement of my presence. And there it was. Two pages from the back, at the bottom below a write-up about a high-school girls volleyball: “Cup-Winning Goalie Grover Comes to Dust Demons.”

 Grover? Grover? Dust Demons? The rest of the article was a typo-ridden mess, full of factual errors and a clear and shameless ignorance of hockey. No photos, no stats, just a quick summary of my accomplishments in a life somewhere far. I threw the paper down on the ground and kicked it out in front of me. The receptionist gave me a dirty look and then went back to tapping on her mobile. I felt the tears coming again, but I grabbed my still-steaming cup of coffee (like anything ever got cold there) and took it all down in one swig. My insides burned, burned like the endless, sprawling blacktop and buildings outside, like the pathetic chartreuse grass that seemed to be planted around every edifice as a joke or half-hearted imitation, burned like everything else in that forsaken, flat, sweltering pit of a town.

 A part of me started to go in that conference room in Canada the moment I found out I was traded. It really is an awful thing, even just to witness, when a goalie’s mind starts to leave him. He notices the crowd and their various taunts or cheers. He notices the empty rows of seats. The silliest little things divert his attention, like a tear or bloodstain on an opponents uniform as he skates in for the shot. The puck is no longer a burning pulsar moving in slow motion. He is no longer able to stare down the leading goal-scorer in the league and supernaturally put his glove exactly where the puck will be a nanosecond after it leaves his stick. The pain becomes noticeable, a thousand times more so. Unless the goalie is fully in the game, the first thing that comes to mind before a save is made is the unyielding ice below. And while we’re talking about pucks, a goalie’s mind, properly honed, usually overrides the primal instinct to avoid objects flying directly towards his head. When you see a goalie flinch or bring his shoulders in slightly to protect himself from the impact of a slapshot, you know he’s beginning to lose it.

It was ninety degrees when I walked into the locker room before our first game of the season. I pulled off my sweat-drenched street clothes and sat down beside my rookie backup, Raffa Kappfa. I had gotten to know my teammates well during preseason workouts, and

 As soon as  my skates hit the slush, I made my first mistake. It was innocent enough, I was simply curious to see how many people had come to watch the first game of the season. To my horror, half the seats were empty, and most of the fans that bothered to show up weren’t even standing to cheer our entrance. To make it worse, the rink announcer’s voice was shrill and obnoxious, like he was presiding over a free-for-all fight rather than introducing the greatest players of one of the most sophisticated and challenging sports in existence. It didn’t help my focus at all when he mispronounced my name. The season opener was a miserable 6-1 loss that only the opposing team’s fans stayed to watch. I wasn’t exactly ashamed of my performance—the score was deceiving considering I had to make 45 saves that game and we hardly got across their blue line.

 Things didn’t get much worse than that, but misery was a constant companion in the beginning. The turning point of the season came when we played against my old team on their ice. It was so wonderful to be in Thunder Bay again, and the one day the team spent in town flew by. I remember being late to the dressing room because I went to see old neighbors and my home which we had rented out for the season. No one on the team, not even the coach, seemed surprised that I was late. Kappfa was suited up and ready to play. He acted happy to see me, but his disappointment at my arrival was obvious.

 When I skated onto the ice, I went towards the wrong goal before quickly realizing my mistake. I was home again, and I played like it. I turned away the shots of my former teammates and some of the replacements like they were throwing wads of paper at me. The crowd began to chant my name; I felt the ice vibrating through my skates. Thanks to a shot that found its way through my five-hole, we were down one to zero in the second, but my resolve solidified after my replacement—my stand-in—showboated after making a stop that paled to the twenty or so I had already made. Mintras—“The Swede”—was his name. He was on my ice, celebrating, and I was not going to let him win.

 Midway through the third, we were still trailing by one, and my porous defense had haplessly let two of my ex-teammates plow into me. As we were untangling ourselves from the pile-up, Michel Kvoruk, who was always the first to skate over and congratulate me after a big win when we played together as Mounties, put his hand on my shoulder. “We miss you up here, chief,” he said before skating away. A few minutes later our leading scorer ripped a shot past The Swede, and for the first time in the season I raised my hands in celebration of a goal. I felt a new lightness surging through my body, and my senses became more acute. The Swede and I exchanged glares through our masks as the teams lined back up at center. The onslaught on my goal continued through the third period but I was a stone wall. I was feeling great—a little tired—but great. My old crowd was as loud as ever—it was a home game for me.

 Overtime came, and it was a quick, intense five minutes. My team’s spirits were high, and it seemed they knew how important the game was to me. But no game ends in a tie—it was time for the shootout. Kvoruk was first, and I read him like a dime novel: glove-side high. The crowd roared. Kvoruk flashed a grin at me as he skated to his bench. The Swede stopped our first shooter with ease, and he made a point of showing it, too. The crowd cheered for The Swede as well, but with less fervor. I turned away a new Mountie, knocking the puck just around the post with the blade of my skate. It was my trademark save, and my former fans showed that they remembered the many times I had used it, like in the waning seconds of game five of the Cup finals against Alberta.

 Our starting center, Jacques Motsky, was next to shoot. He also came in from a Canadian team on a trade. We shared many private sorrows about our move, but he, like me, had adapted to his new life and was starting to turn things around. He juked the Swede and tapped the puck in. The light went on, the fans groaned. Next on the center line was Duncan, the stud right winger whose name was right above mine on two of the three rings of the Cup. Ever since I went south, it had been a habit of mine to lose my focus against star players. I would fall for their ruses or simply not react in time. But I locked my eyes on his as he swooped outside of the slot and came back towards me. He faked an early shot high and tried to skate across me to the open part of the net, but my outstretched skate blade caught the puck, and it harmlessly settled in front of me. The fans chanted my name. Duncan swung around as he skated back to the bench, and I could see him mouth the words “Great game, Sean.”

 Maybe it was the closure that game provided, or the knowledge that I wasn’t an object of ridicule back home. I don’t know exactly what it was about that night, but I once again started to love the game. I was able to shrug off the more annoying things about the desert, and I even stepped outside on the January and February nights to bask in the dry desert breeze. I stopped desperately combing the Sports section. I stopped hearing the jeering and murmuring of the lifeless crowds. The players, the ice, and whole arenas blurred and receded to the periphery of my consciousness and the puck stood out once again like a neutron star. My team took notice and started to pick up their play, rallying behind my newfound confidence. We were still low in our conference, but we had stopped playing like it. We were a band of cast-offs, struggling to maintain our dignity and respect in a town where hockey didn’t belong and wasn’t accepted, and we found strength in each others’ struggles. We starting accumulating three and four game winning streaks, and we found places around town to celebrate our victories and commiserate after defeats.

 Finally, in the first week of April, the regular season reached its merciful conclusion. I had made arrangements a few weeks before to go back to Ontario for the summer where I would spend time relaxing with friends and family and working out with former teammates at the local rink. The buzzer sounded to end the final game, and the crowd, larger than usual, cheered louder for the 3-1 win than they had for any other game all season. I was happy, truly content for the first time since the Thunder Bay game. As I started toward the bench, I thought about cleaning out my locker, taking care of the formalities of leaving town, and getting on the plane back home to Thunder Bay. Motsky was the first one to congratulate me.

 “Sean, San Francisco and Vegas both lost tonight!” he shouted over the cheering fans and pumping music. “We’re eighth in the conference! We’re going to the playoffs!”