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. My defense is skating like they’re underwater. Passes are dying on sticks. I’m doing everything right and we’re getting shelled.

Here’s the thing about being on-call: some weeks, everything you touch works. You’re rolling back that bad deploy before anyone notices. You’re catching the disk space issue at 87% instead of 99%. You’re so dialed in you start getting cocky, maybe let a minor alert sit an extra minute just to see if it self-heals, because you know you can fix it anyway.

Other weeks, you’re making all the right calls and it doesn’t matter. The primary fails over cleanly and the secondary’s already degraded. You catch the memory leak but the restart triggers a cascade. You did the runbook perfectly and the system finds a new way to fail anyway.

Both are the job.

The dangerous part is thinking the first kind of week means you’re great at this, or the second kind means you’re not. Some nights the puck just goes in. Some nights your coverage is perfect and it still finds the gap. The only consistent thing is that you have to show up.

You can’t manufacture chaos in production the way I do on ice - that’s how you end up in a post-mortem explaining why you thought it would be “fun” to test failover during peak traffic. But you also can’t let the brutal weeks convince you that you’re not doing it right.

The shinny game is rec league hockey at eleven PM with a bunch of tired old men. Nobody’s keeping score except me. The second half, we lost 8-2.

In production, someone’s always keeping score. But the principle holds: some nights you just show up, make the saves you can make, and skate off when it’s done.

The job is to show up anyway.