Lannon, being the good friend that he is, blames it on their old coach.

“He was kind of nuts,” Lannon explains. “We were 10 years old and every week we’d have push-up tests. I think it was, like, three pushups that Noah couldn’t do. No one worked out or anything back then, but I think coach took it personally.”

Except for a smattering of all-star games, the two played on different teams for the rest of their pre-collegiate careers. Each changed schools a handful of times, and Lannon even changed time zones.

But after seven years of separation, the two met again—at the peak of New England high school hockey.

* * *

Welch was the senior captain of St. Sebastian’s, the 34-1 powerhouse. He was an All-New England defenseman, and he wore No. 5.

Lannon was the senior captain of Cushing Academy, the 35-0 team-to-beat. He was an All-New England defenseman, and he wore No. 5.

Both were playing in the finals of the New England Prep School Championship—the biggest game of their lives—and both had signed with Harvard.

“There was a lot of hype,” Welch says. “A lot of Lannon-Welch hype, you know?”

Of course there was.

Welch was rocketing up prospect boards nationwide—his Central Scouting ranking had shot up 150 places in less than a year—and he was only a couple months away from being the No. 54 overall pick in the NHL draft.

Lannon, meanwhile, had been on the radar since he started playing Olympic development hockey at the age of 15. About the same time, the Boston Globe wrote a feature on him that described the hockey prodigy as “a parent’s dream come true: tall, handsome, talented, well-mannered, and intelligent.”

Welch and Lannon always had a lot of hype.

The game was a defensive affair, fitting considering that the headliners were arguably the two best prep defenders in the area. But in the end, St. Seb’s handed Cushing its only loss of the season, 1-0, on the way to its first ever Prep School championship.

After the game, the two teams filed across the ice shaking hands, with the captains last in both lines. When Welch reached Lannon—his childhood friend who was still seething after his team’s first loss of the season—he leaned over and told him, “Hey, don’t worry about it. We’ve got four more years left of this.”