Antagonym

Chapter 18

The crowd roared but not for us. The stands were filled with dark blue and white jerseys despite the fact we were only ten minutes from our home campus. Yale filled these stadiums quick, and that was no surprise to me. They wouldn't want those dreaded bobcats in their stands when they could have a wall of bulldogs. Sarcasm aside, I was enjoying this game. Almost halfway through the season and I was defending my ninth shut out.

Considering our first game of the season almost ended in a fight, this season had been going amazingly well. There had been no injuries, suspensions, scandals; you name it. Our record was undefeated as well, which was adding to everyone's egos. The best part? Sylvia and Finn were in the crowd booing as I kicked my sister's employer's ass.

My heart was pounding in my ears as I watched Beck take the face off with the Yale center, John Velnov. I watched Beck flick his stick, sending the puck to Axel before John even had a chance to try and take it. For a center, Beck never kept the puck for long. Instead of hogging it, he played a quick game. Every possession had purpose and a plan. He dominated the ice without even needing to play rough, but he did anyway like everyone else. Beck just had an aura that kept people away from him, and if they got too close he was able to escape his defenders like a knife through butter.

The more time I spent on the ice with him the more I recalled our games against St. Cloud over the years. They were our biggest competitors speaking in the terms of records, not geography, and they had always posed problems for us. I wasn't sure how many games we had lost and won against them, but they had to be about even and sometimes that seemed solely because of Beckett.

Axel took the puck up the ice, dodging his defender and taking a shot at the goal from the left. The puck bounced off the goalies arm, going up into the red metal bar of the goal and bouncing back into the goal off the shoulder of the goalie. Talk about frustration with your own performance; I would not want to be that goalie right now. The referees announced the goal as another face off got ready to go. On this one John won, but Sebastian was up on his left in milliseconds. I saw Seb hit his body against John, sending the puck out of reach as it hit someone's skate. Zeke, my right defender, swooped in and grabbed the puck before one of the Yale players could get it, launching it down the rink to Melvin, the left winger.

Melvin went to shoot on the goal when the Yale defender snatched it out from Melvin's possession, dribbling it between his moving stick as he swerved from left to right. He got closer to the goal as I started to lower my body to block the shot. Sebastian couldn't get to me in time and neither could Melvin, catching us with bad positioning. Beck came up on the side and slammed into the Yale players back, but almost immediately another Yale player crashed into Beck, taking the puck from Beck before he could even really get it. How none of them got a penalty, I don't know.

The black puck slid across the ice towards me. My eyes darted around the ice as I started to move out of the goal to grab it when John appeared out of no where and snatched it up. I wasn't far from the goal, but neither was John. I backed back into the goal and lowered my body again, bending my knees a little more as John came at me. He was about to take a shot when Melvin, who was moving to block the shot, accidentally got bumped by one of the Yale offensive players, causing John to fall towards me at full speed from a foot away

Things happen fast on ice, so when I say John was moving, he was moving. I tried my best to get out of the way but there was nothing I could do because he had only been a foot away. It happened so fast that all one hundred eighty pounds of him slammed into my body, my head hitting the side of the goalpost as John's body flipped over mine. Pain blossomed in the back of my neck as the air got knocked out of my lungs, shocking me as I hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.

I heard the whistle but I was already on my back with my eyes closed, the cold ice bleeding through my clothing and chilling my skin. My inner leg was throbbing up near my crotch, the sharp pain in my hip radiating up and down my side. I didn't even know where my stick was, I was so discombobulated.