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Some players like to act as if there’s something special about goalies. Some sort of inherent observation skill or mystical awareness of team dynamics. Maybe some goalies have that, but Chris absolutely does not. Any observation he does is just by virtue of being at the back of the play.
(Maybe some goalies have that. Chris has never met Johnson, the legendary SMH goalie who preceded him, but he got a few Instagram messages from the guy once. Just from that, Johnson is enough of a weirdo to fit the stereotype. Chris is nowhere near that weird. Honestly, Chris is pretty normal, for a goalie.)
Mostly, Chris wants to have a good time. Obviously, he has that bit of killer instinct necessary to compete at higher levels, but he started playing hockey for fun and has always continued because it’s still fun. The team is a big part of the fun, so he tries to be a good buddy and keep morale up. That’s just teammate stuff, not goalie stuff, but if the guys are a little more inclined to listen to him because he is a goalie, he is happy enough to do his part.
Still, the deal with Nursey and Dex is way outside Chris’ job description as a member of the team, goalie or not. Chris genuinely likes them as individuals, but if they weren’t the other guys in his class who hang out at the Haus a lot, he might have just left them to their whole…thing.
But they are, and he picked them as his friends, and they picked him back. He’s committed to them now.
For the first month or so, Dex and Nursey are at each other’s throats so loudly and so consistently that Chris kind of resigns himself to accepting it as the new background radiation of his life. They are nice enough to him about it. He doesn’t want to start doing it enough to be a nag, but they listen to him if he tries to get their attention during an argument.
It’s fine. It’s maybe not super awesome, but it’s fine.
Then, very suddenly, the intensity of the arguing goes down several notches. Dex and Nursey don’t volunteer details about whatever happened, so Chris figures they’re just embarrassed and that they finally snapped completely and reached an understanding. In any case, the change seems positive, so he rolls with it.
It’s nice to have friends who are also friends with each other.
It doesn’t get weird until later.
By the end of their first year, Nursey and Dex move in sync. At first, Chris doesn’t think anything of it. D-pairs do that. Ransom and Holster will skew anyone’s idea of what counts as normal for defensemen, but they are the illogical extreme of a dynamic that pops up a lot. Chris is the goalie, and that may not bestow any magic observation powers, but the defensemen are right in front of him all the time. He has eyes, and the fact of the matter is that if you stick two guys together for long enough, they start to account for each other automatically. Chris has seen it a thousand times.
(Maybe not literally a thousand. A lot, though.)
It doesn’t always translate off the ice. Chris likes to be friends with his teammates, but even he can’t be friends with everyone. There are a lot of guys on a hockey team. Sometimes, it just doesn’t happen. Nothing wrong with that. “Teammate” is a good relationship to have with somebody, too.
College hockey is more socially intense than any other team Chris has played on, because the Samwell team is together all the time. They practice together, they travel together, they study together. They get breakfast and lunch and dinner together. When he isn’t with his girlfriend, Chris hangs out with various combinations of teammates more than he has hung out with any teammates in his life.
It’s awesome, and it’s a recipe for chemistry even for guys who don’t play the same position—which is great! Chris couldn’t be happier with that. Skaters make sure to show their goalies love, but it is super nice to be included without anybody having to make a special effort. (Chris is totally pumped to get Jack’s dibs, for all of the above reasons and because Jack Zimmermann thinks that well of him. It feels good to belong.)
Anyway, the point is, defense partners synchronize. Dex and Nursey doing it doesn’t mean anything until Chris notices how much they do it off the ice, too. Ransom and Holster are loudly and obviously compatible. Dex and Nursey are quieter; the loudest thing about them is their arguing, which is exactly the opposite of syncing up.
Chris takes it as a good sign that they are getting along. Maybe next year will go more smoothly.
Come on. Is it any wonder that it takes Chris so long to catch on?
The summer after freshman year is kind of a rough one. Spending so much time with his new college hockey buddies is great—right up until they are all on the other end of the country. Then there are no hugs, no high fives, no pad taps, no late-night kitchen hangouts, no parties, no Beyoncé playing from another room…
Being home is nice. The hot weather is nice. Being a day-trip drive away from a West Coast beach is nice. He hangs out with his sister and his high school friends, hearing stories about UCLA and Caltech and telling his own about New England. He works his summer job, enjoys the easy access to boba, and calls Caitlin and his friends back east. Nursey seems a little lonely too. Dex is busier. Both of them text Chris back at weird hours—fishing boat work hours, messed-up sleep schedules, and time zones all lead to pretty funky timestamps—but that is actually oddly comforting. A lot of days, he fires off a text before he goes to bed and wakes up to a response in the morning. It fits nicely around the more regular scheduled calls he has with Caitlin.
Chris enjoys the break, but when the days start to shorten again, he is just as happy to fly back across the country for the new school year, even if it means walking directly into the teeth of the oncoming winter. Stepping into the Haus feels like coming home, too, in a different way from being back in California.
Falling into the rhythm of life in the Haus is the easiest thing in the world. Ransom and Holster make more boisterous leaders than Jack, but they do their best to watch out for their team. Living in the Haus, Chris gets to watch them work up close.
Since Chris has a room in the Haus, Chris also gets to spend more time with Lardo, so that is really cool. After Chris got Jack’s dibs, a couple of the guys tried to mess with him by telling him all about how terrifying it would be to share a bathroom with her. The joke is on them, though. Chris grew up sharing a bathroom with a broken lock with his sister. At least he and Lardo can trust each other to knock. The worst she ever does is leave paint streaks, and the counter actually looks pretty artistic.
(When he tells her that, she whoops and says, “Eat your heart out, Jackson Pollock!”)
Chris having his own room in the Haus also means Dex and Nursey start spending even more time there, which is great. A few weeks in, they get drunk in Chris’ room while discussing the crop of freshman. In the morning, when they detangle themselves from their pile on the floor, they declare frog beer-and-whine night a new tradition.
So, for a while, Chris assumes it’s a linemate thing.
He started playing goalie pretty much immediately. His family went to a Sharks game when he was little, he was completely captivated, and he tottered out onto the ice in itty-bitty child skates at the closest rink a few weeks later. His mom says he tried playing forward and defense, but he has no memory of that whatsoever.
The point is, Chris has been a goalie for a long time. He doesn’t have lineys, obviously. He always has a fellow goalie, but it isn’t the same. Goalies on the same team compete, even while they support each other. Skater lines rely on cooperation. The dynamic is just different.
For the most part, linemates act like any other combination of teammates, but occasionally, they get weird. Case in point: Holster and Ransom, but Chris has seen other guys get weird, too. It isn’t like the way skaters shrug and call goalies weird. Other skaters also see the weirdness when lineys take their connection to another level. Chris has checked, just in case.
Nursey and Dex have been weird about each other from day one. Chris has had a front-row seat to all that. Doesn’t mean he understands it, but he doesn’t have to. He can appreciate no-look passes for what they are.
Dex and Nursey don’t always pull those out in practice. At first, that doesn’t even register with Chris, because those passes are hard. Nobody can do them all the time. They take spatial awareness that can change in a second, and the margin for error is very small. If one player misjudges the other’s position, it straight-up doesn’t work.
Here’s the thing: Chris can get a lot of information from watching the guys in front of him. An opposing forward covering the crease will position himself based on the actions of the forward wrapping around behind, which tells Chris when he needs to slide over to seal the post. His defense drifting too far to the side means he has to watch out for opportunistic shots coming from the blue line. Every player is always moving to respond to the movements of the others in a constantly shifting puzzle that Chris, stationed in the back, learned how to read.
So, eventually, Chris notices that Dex and Nursey always know where the other is. And once he sees that, the lack of no-look passes starts to look stranger. Chris will expect one during a scrimmage, thinking that Nursey knows Dex is behind him, and it won’t happen. He’ll think Dex is feinting one direction to toss a pass off to Nursey when Nursey has the better shot and be completely wrong.
He swears they know each other’s positions, though. They move like they do. He sees it. It’s right there before his eyes. He doesn’t know how they know, but he is sure that they do. He has seen guys get weird about each other before, so he wouldn’t question it—except. Why don’t they use it?
All told, he thinks he figured it out pretty quickly. After all, nobody else did.
So, maybe he starts looking a little closer after that. He might think he was imagining it, but once he’s looking, he sees it all over them, even off the ice, which—what the fuck? Don’t get him wrong; he is happy they are getting along. That doesn’t make it any less weird, though.
For about a day, he wonders if they might be secretly dating. That hypothesis dies an awkward death as soon as he tries to subtly test the waters, and then Nursey makes fun of Dex’s taste in men for forty-five minutes while they watch clips of different superhero movies.
Back to other theories. Chris doesn’t have anything else, though.
Their kind of sync in a defense pair comes from compatibility in playing style and experience playing together. One without the other is only okay. The combination of both is what makes a duo good. What Chris doesn’t understand is why they don’t show it off more. Even aside from the obvious cool factor, it’s a good thing. The coaches would be thrilled to see it, and the team would treat it like business as usual.
So…what else is going on here? Why wouldn’t they want to be a d-pair who can read each other’s minds?
Oh.
Oh, shit.
It’s ridiculous. It’s impossible. Of course they can’t actually read each other’s minds. It’s hockey, not magic. Chris has seen guys get weird about each other before, and that wasn’t anything supernatural.
(Probably.)
(Shit, what if it was?)
(No, that’s silly.)
Dex and Nursey hated each other at first. They came around, learned to work together, and mellowed out. Chris may not know exactly how that happened, but—
Well, they spend a lot of time together. They put dedicated effort into coordinating their movements. Just because Chris sometimes watches them ignore really good chances for sw’awesome drop passes—
Okay, but something like that should be pretty noticeable off the ice, too, right? Nursey and Dex are friends now, but Dex’s ability to find Nursey at a house party faster than anyone else doesn’t have to mean—
“Am I delusional?” Chris asks his reflection.
“If you have to ask, the odds on that answer aren’t good, Chow,” Lardo says from outside the bathroom door. “Can I get in there, or are you having a real crisis?”
“No, I’m done.” He isn’t, but he also can’t tell anyone else about this. Even he barely believes it.
But as the season goes on, he gets more and more convinced. Trying to pull it into words to explain it to anyone else still doesn’t work, but he notices more and more tiny details. Dex and Nursey will hang out at the same study table and not say a word to each other, and then they’ll start bickering like they were already halfway through the conversation. If Chris asks Nursey where Dex is, sometimes he gets an answer when Nursey probably shouldn’t know. Nursey tries to trip Dex, and Dex steps over it without even seeming to register the attempt. Dex and Chris briefly lose Nursey at an event on campus, and Nursey pops up a few minutes later across the quad and hands Dex a coffee without a word.
When Chris remembers the Zener card thing from last semester, he feels kind of stupid, even though there is no way he could have known at the time.
By the time summer break rolls around, Chris is totally convinced. Maybe being away from school for a couple of months will help, though. If he comes back with fresh eyes and still sees psychic powers in Dex and Nursey’s behavior…well, he’ll deal with it then. For now, he can put it out of his mind and look forward to spending a weekend with the Farmers before he heads home.
Nope. The summer changes absolutely nothing.
After all that, frog beer-and-whine night is a huge relief.
He does have to check the next morning to make sure the conversation actually happened, though. Per tradition, they fell asleep on the floor in a tangle of pillows and shared blankets, and when they finally peel their eyes open, Chris rolls over to look at Nursey and asks, “Hey, can you tell me I was right again?”
Nursey blinks blearily at him a couple of times before comprehension dawns on his face. “Oh, yeah. D-man telepathy, you totally called it. You wanna see it in action?”
“I’ve been seeing it in action,” Chris points out. “That’s how I figured out you could do it.”
“Not the same, dude. You have to let us show off for you.”
Dex appears in the doorway with a couple of water bottles. “Yeah, you pretty much have to,” he agrees.
Chris makes a neat one-handed catch and starts working on his hydration. “Of course I’ll watch you show off. You have to tell me all about it now.”
“Well, Dex sucks at explaining shit, so I’ll do most of the telling—”
“I do not, I explained all kinds of things to you—”
Chris drinks his water and lets the dulcet sounds of his best friends arguing wash over him like soothing white noise. He may be a bit hungover, but he can’t help his smile.
Now that Chris is in on the joke, watching Nursey and Dex do their thing is actually pretty fun. It isn’t all that different from before, except that now he can ask about it when he spots it. Dex always seems surprised to be clocked, which never fails to amuse Nursey.
And on the ice, they factor him in on the plays, since he knows what they can do.
Chris has been watching Dex and Nursey for a while, but now, they know he knows what he sees. It doesn’t make a huge difference—maybe once in a month’s worth of games—but the knowing lights a warm little spark in his chest.
It’s always nice to be included.