Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Girl who changed the Game: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 9

Monday came faster than I would have preferred.I spent Sunday doing what I always do when I'm nervous about something: I prepared obsessively and then told myself I wasn't nervous. I made a list of interview questions. I reorganized the list. I looked up Declan Mercer's stats from last season, which were and I say this with full journalistic objectivity annoyingly good. Forty three points in thirty one games. Conference rookie of the year. A quote in the campus paper from November where he said his goal for sophomore year was to "just play better hockey," which was either refreshingly unpretentious or deeply evasive depending on how charitable you were feeling.I was feeling professionally neutral.I also, at approximately eleven PM, found a video someone had posted on the athletics Instagram of him scoring a goal that involved skating around two defenders in a move that had no business being that fluid, set to a song that I would never admit made me watch it three times.Research.

Wednesday practice did not start well.This was my fault, which I'm noting upfront so nobody thinks I'm about to blame someone else for something that was objectively my fault. I set two alarms the night before five AM and five-fifteen, the backup system I'd been using since freshman year of high school and somehow, in the specific insanity of Tuesday night, I forgot that I'd silenced my phone during a film review session and never unsilenced it.I woke up at six oh seven.Practice started at six.I'm going to skip over the next eleven minutes because they were not my finest and I'd like to preserve some dignity here. What I will say is that I made it to the rink by six eighteen with my recorder, my notebook, my jacket on correctly, and my hair in a ponytail that was doing its best under the circumstances. I pushed through the rink doors with the energy of someone arriving casually, not someone who had jogged the last four blocks in twenty-two degree weather.The cold hit me like a wa

The thing about sharing ice with a hockey team is that it requires a level of diplomatic patience I was not issued at birth.I have tried to explain this to Bria, my roommate, who is a swimmer and therefore operates in her own lane literally and has never once had to negotiate rink time with seventeen men who treat every surface they occupy as something they conquered rather than borrowed. Bria's response was to make tea and say "that sounds really hard" in the voice she uses when she's listening but also reading something on her phone.My point stands regardless.Tuesday morning was our overlap day. The figure skating team had the ice from five to six thirty. Hockey had it from six thirty to eight. The agreement, such as it was, lived in a shared athletics calendar that both programs theoretically respected and practically treated as a loose suggestion when it suited them.Today it suited them to arrive at six twenty.I was in the middle of my step sequence the section of my program

I have a pre competition routine that has not changed since I was fifteen.The night before anything important, a competition, a significant practice run, a session where I'm attempting something I haven't fully landed yet, I do the same things in the same order. I lay out my training clothes. I review the program in my head from start to finish without skipping the hard parts. I make chamomile tea that I don't actually like but that my first coach swore by, and I drink it sitting on the floor of wherever I'm living because I started doing it on the floor of my childhood bedroom and the floor part stuck.It's not superstition. It's architecture. The routine builds a container for the nerves so they have somewhere to live that isn't my body.I was sitting on the floor of my dorm room at ten PM on Wednesday with my chamomile tea and my program notes when Bria came in from the library, dropped her bag, looked at me, and said: "Floor night.""Thursday's a big practice," I said."The Lutz?