The rink had never been so quiet.
The moment that had stretched between Silver and Eli in the Gothic seminar room—that charged silence when their eyes had met across scattered notes and unspoken understanding—felt like it belonged to a different universe entirely. The warmth of mutual recognition, the careful banter that had started to rebuild bridges between them, all of it seemed impossibly distant now as Silver sat in the student section of Ingalls Rink watching everything fall apart.
The boards still rattled from the impact of Eli's last desperate shot attempt, the puck sailing wide of Harvard's net with the kind of precision that belonged to nightmares rather than championship hockey. But it was the silence that followed the final buzzer that landed harder than any body check either team had delivered during sixty minutes of brutal competition.
