With less than a minute to go in the second, Data picked up a loose puck in the Owls’ corner and clipped it off the boards to Travis, who saw Nish shooting up into the play. Nish took the puck and charged over centre, the backchecking Selects winger unable to stay with him.
Nish flipped the puck again. Not high toward the clock this time, but a gentle little flick that sent the puck between the two defencemen who were beginning to squeeze toward him. Both defence decided to play the man and went for Nish, but Nish jumped high, right between them. He was home free, until he lost his grip and fell.
Nish spun toward the corner, the puck still on his stick. Flat on his stomach, he managed to look up and see Sarah coming in along the near side. He swept the puck to her just before crashing into the boards, and Sarah fired a pass hard across the crease to Dmitri, who had the whole open side of the net to tap the puck into.
Selects 2, Owls 2.
When the second period was up, the Owls skated off to a huge ovation for their comeback. Even Agent Morris of the FBI was on his feet. And all the Disney people.
“Delay Nish for a bit,” Sarah said to Travis.
Travis nodded. He waited at the boards, slapping each teammate as the player left the ice, and then grabbed Nish as he was coming off.
“Spanish radio wants to interview you,” Travis told him.
Nish stopped dead in his tracks. “I can’t speak Spanish!” he said.
“Doesn’t matter–they’ll translate.”
“Where do I go?” Nish asked. He didn’t seem surprised that they would want to interview him.
“You just wait here,” Travis said. “They’ll come down to you.”
Travis hurried into the dressing room, giggling at his own trick. Sarah was already at work. She had taken the scissors Mr. Dillinger used to cut away tape and was chopping up the Polaroid of Nish into dozens of little pieces, which she then piled carefully on his locker seat.
“Is he coming?” she asked.
“He thinks he’s about to be interviewed on Spanish radio,” Travis said.
The rest of the Owls looked up, realized the trick that had been played, and roared with laughter.
The door banged open and Nish roared in, furious, throwing his stick and turning on Travis.
“There was no one there to interview me!”
Nish was beet red, his face contorted with anger. Travis knew he’d have to do some fancy talking to save this one.
“I guess I got the periods wrong,” Travis said. “They must have meant the end of the game. The guy didn’t speak English that well.”
Nish considered this to make great sense.
“Okay,” he said. “But don’t waste my time like that again.”
Nish wandered over to his seat, dropping his gloves and helmet.
“What’s this?” he asked.
He brushed away the pieces of the incriminating photograph. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said to no one in particular.
“You’re playing great hockey,” said a familiar voice from the back of the room.
It was Muck.
“Thank you,” said Nish again. He thought Muck was speaking directly to him.
“All of you,” said Muck. “I have nothing more to tell you.”
And with that, Muck walked out of the dressing room, smiling.
Whether Jenny had “turned her equipment on” or not didn’t matter. She was spectacular in the third period, on one occasion stopping the big centre on a clear breakaway.
But Jenny had some help. She got it from Nish (who seemed to block as many shots as she did), and she got it from Data (who kept clearing the puck) and Sarah (who backchecked with ferocious energy). At the other end, Travis and Dmitri kept up a solid forecheck, causing turnover after turnover. The brilliant glove hand of the Selects’ goalie took away a sure goal from Andy, and an excellent poke check stopped Travis on what looked like an easy tap-in.
Regulation time came to an end with the teams still tied. Muck spoke to them before the five-minute overtime.
“They’re starting to send in two forecheckers,” said Muck. “I know Deke’s style. He figures to panic our defence. Nishikawa?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You like to carry the puck, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“If you get a chance, go for it. We cut off their two men in deep, we might be able to make something of this. Data, you stay back and do what you have to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
The chance came a couple of minutes later. Data had the puck hard against the boards in the Owls’ end, and both forecheckers converged on him, convinced they could cause a turnover. Instead of panicking, however, Data used the boards to send a long curling pass around to Nish, who picked up the puck in full stride.
As the two forecheckers peeled away from Data, he “slipped” and fell, spinning into one of them and slipping his stick under the other forward’s skate. The skate skittered on the stick and the forward slipped to one knee, losing a valuable second.
Nish was already free and flying. He had the puck on the end of his stick and was cutting across centre on the diagonal, looking for the pass to Dmitri. But Dmitri had headed for the bench, and Simon had already leapt over the boards.
Nish saw Simon coming into the play. He faked a forward pass to Sarah, causing the one Selects defenceman to cross over, then dumped a little backhand pass to Simon just as he hit the blueline. With the defenceman already committed to Sarah, he couldn’t turn back in time, and Simon was in, alone.
Simon tried the same play–five hole–again, but this time the goaltender was expecting it. She kicked out the rebound hard.
It slid straight into Travis’s feet. He turned his right skate and trapped the puck, kicking it ahead onto his stick blade. As he did so, he turned, realizing the crease was suddenly filling up with bodies. There was only one passing option open to him. Nish.
The big Owls defenceman was charging the net. Thanks to Data’s “accident,” there was still no one on Nish. Travis’s pass hit Nish perfectly.
The two defencemen tried to converge on Nish, but suddenly Simon spurted through an opening and brushed against the right one so he spun off to the side. By looking back and appearing to be expecting another pass, Simon had made it look accidental. It might have been.
The other defence tackled Nish. He knew he might take a penalty but, given the time in the game and the score, it was his only play. He leapt at Nish, draping himself over him as Nish tried to bull the puck in toward the Selects’ net.
Nish wouldn’t go down. The Selects defender wrestled him, but Nish broke one hand free as the puck slid between his checker’s skates. He shook off the checker, but was in so close he couldn’t quite get his stick past the sliding goaltender and the defenceman’s back skate.
Nish had no option. Off balance, on the verge of falling into the net, unable even to see exactly what he was doing, he put the stick between his own legs, tried a blind shot, and fell.
The puck rose without enough force to reach the crossbar. It clipped off the goalie’s right shoulder, then rolled up and over–and in!
Nish had scored!
And he had scored on the Mario Lemieux between-the-legs shot!
Final score: Owls 3, Selects 2.
The Owls’ bench burst open and they flew onto the ice. In the Selects’ end, they piled onto Nish, who was yelling and screaming as if he were still on the Tower of Terror ride. Sarah had both arms around Nish. Nish had an arm around Simon, twisting his helmet again. Data piled in, and then came the players from the bench as the cheers poured down on them from the seats of the Ice Palace.
“We won!”
“We won!”
“We won!”
“You did it, Nish!” Simon called from the pack. “You scored on the Lemieux shot!”
Nish grinned. “Thanks to you, pal.”
“How’d you even see it?” Travis asked.
Nish grinned again.
“X-ray vision,” he said.
The teams and coaches lined up to shake hands–Muck and his old friend Deke Larose hugging each other–and then they stood for the Canadian anthem.
Travis stood staring up at the Maple Leaf and the American Stars and Stripes. He thought about everything that had happened to the Owls this week. He thought about what might have happened if Data hadn’t wondered why the two Goofy costumes were different. He thought about what he would do when he got to the dressing room. He would present Simon with the photograph of him on the ride that had terrified him. After tonight’s game, no one would ever again be calling him “Chicken Milliken.” Not after what he had done to set up Nish’s spectacular goal.
The anthem ended, and a man with dark hair hurried out onto the ice, reaching for Nish, who was trying to get his hands on the trophy. The man pulled Nish aside, and Travis could see him speaking fast to Nish. Nish was nodding, smiling.
The man and Nish began leaving the ice, passing right in front of Travis as they left.
“It’s Spanish radio,” said Nish. “You were right. They wanted me at the end of the game!”
THE END
“Ici!”
“Travis–une pour moi!”
“Moi, s’il vous plaît!”
“Moi!”
It was cold enough to see their breath, yet Travis Lindsay was sweating as he stumbled and stuttered and tried to answer the shouts of the crowd gathered around him. How he wished he’d paid more attention in French class. If only they’d speak slower. If only he were standing closer to Sarah Cuthbertson, who was in French immersion, and who was yakking away happily as she signed her name, again and again and again.
Travis was helpless. He could do nothing but nod and smile and sign his name to the hockey cards they kept shoving into his hand.
He wished he understood better. He did not, however, wish that any of this would stop. As far as he was concerned–as far as any of the Screech Owls was concerned–this moment could go on forever.
“Travis! Ici!”
“Moi!”
This was what he had dreamed about all those long winter evenings when he’d sat at the kitchen table practising his signature. This was why he’d worked on that fancy, swirling loop on the L of “Lindsay,” very carefully putting “#7” inside the loop to indicate his sweater number, just like the real NHLers did. He knew that his mother and father had been smiling to each other as they watched him work on signing his name, and he wished they could see him now. Travis Lindsay–Number 7, with a loop–signing autograph after autograph outside the renowned Quebec Colisée.
There was no end to the surprises on this trip to Quebec City. The Owls had come for the special fortieth anniversary of the Quebec International Peewee Tournament, the biggest and most special peewee hockey tournament on Earth. The Screech Owls were just one of nearly 150 teams entered, and Travis just one of 2,500 players, but every single player felt as if the Quebec Peewee could be his or her tournament, the moment where he or she would make their mark and be noted by all who saw them play.
Like everyone else here, Travis knew the history of the Quebec Peewee. He knew that it was here that Guy Lafleur and Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux had all come to national attention.
More than fourteen thousand fans showed up in the Colisée to cheer the great Lafleur the night he scored seven goals in a single game. The following day, they sewed seven velvet pucks onto his sweater and his photograph was splashed across the country’s sports pages–a national superstar at the age of twelve!
Wayne Gretzky’s team had come here from Brantford two years after Gretzky scored an amazing 378 goals in a single season. Mario Lemieux had first demonstrated his amazing puck-handling here. Brett Hull, Steve Yzerman, Denis Savard, Pat LaFontaine, they had all starred here. And so had a young peewee goaltender named Patrick Roy, who was stopping pucks with a strange new style they were calling “the butterfly.”
In the forty-year history of the Quebec City tournament, nearly five hundred of the young players who had come here had gone on to NHL careers–a record unmatched by any other minor-hockey gathering in the entire world.
The time might even come when people would talk about this tournament as the one where young Travis Lindsay served notice that he was NHL-bound. They might say this was where Sarah Cuthbertson, captain of the Olympic gold-medal-winning Canadian women’s hockey team, first came to national attention. Or that this was where the scouts first began talking about Wayne Nishikawa, the best defenceman in the entire National Hockey League. Travis or Sarah or Nish–or Jeremy, Jesse, Derek, Dmitri, Jenny, Lars, Simon, Andy, Fahd, Wilson, Liz–the Screech Owls were all here, each one with his or her own special dream for Quebec City.
They already had their own hockey cards. And their own fans. Just like in the NHL.
Sure, the autograph collectors were kids, almost all of them younger than the Owls themselves, but the cards were real. Upper Deck, the best card manufacturer there was, had contacted every team headed for the Quebec Peewee, and team managers, like Mr. Dillinger, had handed out forms for the players to fill out, telling how tall they were and how much they weighed, what position they played, and how many goals and assists they had last season. There was even a question about which NHL player they modelled their play after, and another about what they enjoyed off the ice. Upper Deck had also asked for action shots of each player, and Data’s father had taken photos of all of them in turn: Travis stopping in a spray of snow, Sarah stickhandling the puck, Jeremy making a stretch glove save, Nish taking a slapper from the point.
As each team arrived in Quebec City, someone from Upper Deck had met them with a large box of hockey cards for their team manager to hand out. The players were overwhelmed. The cards were of the best stock, complete with a glossy photograph of each player on the front, and a head shot, showing just his or her face, on the back. Each player’s statistics and personal information were printed in fine gold lettering, and the team captains–like Travis–skated over a small hologram of the tournament logo.
Upper Deck also distributed the cards–by the thousands, it seemed–among the young fans of Quebec City. The free cards almost caused a riot outside the Colisée, where some of the teams, including the Owls, were lucky enough to book their first practice. The young fans seemed to know what the cards might one day mean. If they somehow had a card signed by Guy Lafleur the night he scored his seven goals, or by Wayne Gretzky when he played here, what would it be worth today?
Everyone wanted the captains’ signatures. Travis knew it was because the captains’ cards had the beautiful hologram, and he was trapped by eager autograph-seekers as he tried to plough his way through to the team bus after practice.
“Travis!”
“Moi!”
“Une carte seule, s’il vous plaît!”
He felt like a fool, unable to speak to them properly. He signed, and muttered stupidly: “Merci…Oui…Merci…Bonjour…Oui…Merci…” He knew they could tell he understood about as much French as a kindergarten student. Why couldn’t he be like Sarah, who was talking as much as she was signing? Why couldn’t he be like…like Nish, standing over there in a huge circle of young fans, signing his name as if he was greeting his adoring public outside Maple Leaf Gardens on a Saturday night.
Travis looked over, puzzled, as he signed another card. Why was his best friend drawing such a big crowd?
By the time he finally made it to the old school bus, and Mr. Dillinger had closed the door on the remaining fans who were still holding up cards and calling out their names, Travis was certain that they were calling out “Nishikawa!” far more than “Lindsay!” He decided to investigate.
Travis finally found Nish, last seat on the bus, flat on his back and holding his right wrist up as if he’d just been slashed.
“I’ve got writer’s cramp, man,” Nish moaned when he saw Travis. “Real bad–I don’t know whether I can play or not.”
“Very funny,” Tr
avis said. “Where’s your card?”
Nish suddenly blinked, surprised. “You want my autograph?”
“I just want to see it.”
Nish made a big thing out of checking his jacket pockets. There was nothing wrong with his wrist now. He patted and probed and seemed happy to come up empty.
“Sorry, pal–all out. Can’t keep up with the public demand, it seems.”
Lars turned to help. “I traded him for one,” Lars said to Travis, reaching back with a card. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” Travis said. He caught Lars’s eye. There was a message in the look Lars was giving him. He wanted Travis to see something.
Travis returned to his seat and compared Nish’s card with his own. Data’s father had taken a wonderful shot of Nish firing the puck from the point, and the head shot on the back was fine, but those were the only similarities. Travis had listed his statistics from last year–37 goals, 39 assists, 14 minutes in penalties–and had said he tries to play like NHL superstar Paul Kariya. He had added that he played baseball and soccer and lacrosse in the off-season and liked any movie with Jim Carrey in it. Nish’s card had his statistics right–14 goals, 53 assists, 42 minutes in penalties–but there truth came to an abrupt end.
Nish had said he’d already been scouted by the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.
He had said Brian Leetch, Norris Trophy winner as the NHL’s best defenceman, played a lot like him–not that he tried to play like Brian Leetch.
He had said Paul Kariya was his cousin.
Nish had his eyes closed when Travis made his way back to the last seat. Travis slapped Nish’s knee, causing the choirboy eyes to flutter open. Nish obviously knew what was coming.
“You can’t do this!” Travis said, holding out Nish’s card.
“Can’t do what?” Nish asked, blinking innocently.
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 2 Page 15