It’s 5 PM on a Thursday. Something broke mid-morning and your team has been grinding on it for hours. Good engineers, working hard, coming up empty because the system is poorly documented and the people who built it have either moved on or moved teams. You’ve burned most of the day and you’re no closer to resolution. So you escalate. You ping the leads. You ask in the channel where someone, surely, knows this service well enough to point you in the right direction.

The blood on my hands didn’t register as blood at first. I’d thrown my mask off after the shot. Reflex. Pain management. Give the jaw some air. The pain was sharp and then immediately dull, the kind that makes you think stinger before it makes you think anything else. So I knelt on the ice, head down, eyes on the white below me, and stayed there. A couple of guys skated over.

Easy save. I could smother it, kill the play. Instead I kick it out to their other forward. Not a mistake. A choice. I’m bored and my team’s up four goals and I want to make another save. So I manufacture chaos, create my own work, turn an easy night into something that feels like hockey. That’s the first thirty-six minutes. The second half, I’m making four saves in a row and watching the fifth one trickle past my pad anyway.

I was standing outside a conference room watching my team lie to another team about a database outage. It was day four. Through the glass door, I could see the engineer on the call, explaining with impressive confidence that our cloud provider was having issues. Any minute now, they said, the vendor would resolve it and services would come back up. I pulled up the provider’s status page. Green across the board.

Well, maybe not everything. Look, being a goalie is objectively ridiculous. You strap on forty pounds of equipment designed to protect you from frozen rubber traveling at speeds that would make physicists frown. Then you stand in front of a net and dare people to shoot at you. It’s a strange job. But here’s the thing: being a goalie is basically the same job as running ops, or security, or honestly, any part of software development where you’re the one who has to keep the thing from breaking.