***

It is almost midnight on March 20, 2004.

The kid is 21 now. He is at Pepsi Arena in Albany, N.Y. He is wearing a suit and carrying a pen, notebook and digital voice recorder, a neat piece of technology that actually works. Sometimes.

It’s after a hockey game. He is standing on the ice. He is not supposed to be there. He’s not on the team, like he always was at Garber High School.

He’s a print journalist now, and only photographers and TV reporters are allowed on the ice. Those are the rules.

But ever since he turned in his shoulder pads and flak jacket for a life of laptops and phone lines, the kid had learned something: Sometimes, you have to go where you’re not supposed to in order to do your job.

So, he had ducked into the penalty box, sneaked onto the ice and walked toward a bunch of guys his age that were hugging each other and screaming. They were the 2003-2004 Harvard men’s ice hockey team, and they had just won the league championship.

The kid smiles. Yes, there was a press badge around his neck. But reporters have feelings, too, and these were people the kid felt happy for.

There’s Kenny Smith, the captain. He had taken heat when the team struggled. He had some rough games along the way. He was benched twice. But he kept the dressing room together and was always honest with that writer. So, press badge be damned, the kid smiled when Smith scored the game-winning goal.

A couple times that night, the writer wondered what it might’ve felt like to win a league championship with his best friends back in Essexville. They never had that chance, of course. They stunk too bad.

But he could see what that title meant to his classmates, guys from places like Lacombe, Alberta, and Stoneham, Mass., and Macon, Ga. He didn’t know them as well as he knew the Kyle O’Neills and Jeff Quasts and Mark Stefaniaks, his teammates and best buddies back in Essexville, but he knew them well enough to smile.

Still, this championship wasn’t his to enjoy. He had a story to write. Putting words on a computer screen was his thing now.

He couldn’t linger on the ice like he did on the field four years before. He wasn’t on the team anymore. He had a deadline to meet. So, he got his one-on-one interview with Smith and left.

The press box beckoned.

***