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. Told them I was fine. Just a stinger. Give me a minute.

I believed that.

I stood up. Reached around to check on things. Brought my hands to my eyes.

They were covered in blood.

This is a shinny game. Eleven at night in Toronto, which is the only time you can get ice when you’re thirty-five and have kids and a job and a long list of reasons why you should probably be in bed. The guy who shot it was younger than the rest of us, wearing red, came in from the blue line on my right side and unloaded a hard wrist shot. I was dropping to make the save. The puck hit my shoulder on the way down, deflected hard, and found the gap between the bottom edge of my mask and the top of my neck guard.

I didn’t know that gap existed.

I’ve thought about that a lot since.

Once the blood started it didn’t stop. Someone handed me a towel. My friend swapped it for a wad of paper towels and I held it to my chin, to my neck, trying to figure out where exactly the problem was. He offered another wad a few minutes later. I replaced it and glanced briefly at the soaked one as it went in the trash.

Then the nausea hit, and someone said we should call 911, and I heard myself say that I was starting to feel light headed, and someone guided me to a bench.

What happened next is the part I’ve been glossing over for two years.

My hands went numb. Then my feet. Then they started to clench, fingers curling inward like something was pulling them closed. I slumped right. The feeling left my face. Then the right side of my body. I remember someone to my left trying to make sure I stayed conscious, talking at me, keeping me present. I remember paramedics removing my pads and skates while I sat there. I remember my vision blurring. I remember the questions getting harder to answer and then, for a while, not a lot else.

I know I got onto a stretcher. I don’t remember getting onto it. I know it was cold outside, Toronto in winter, and I remember the bumps of the path to the ambulance because it had snowed. I remember the lights inside the ambulance and the sound of the sirens and the medics figuring out which hospital could take me fastest. I remember one of them going through my wallet for my health card and either not finding it or deciding I was declining too fast to stop. Both seemed possible at the time.

The ER doctor stitched me up and told me, while her hands were still in my neck, that whatever hit me was a centimeter or two from being fatal. Then she said she was going to call her son when she was done. He was around my age. Played hockey. She wanted to make sure he was ok.

In the moment that was nothing. I was wearing hockey pants and a cartoon mummy wrap of tape and gauze, paying a forty-five dollar ambulance transfer fee, trying to find the cut with a selfie while waiting for a nurse. The cut was gaping — wound edges pulled wide apart, the kind that doesn’t close on its own — and even then it was hard to find in my beard. My brain was somewhere between shock and an unusual species of relief. I got stitched. Got discharged. My in-law picked me up outside a hospital I’d never been to, on a street I didn’t recognize.

The part that landed later, once I’d told the story enough times to hear it out loud, was this: she finished her shift, went home, and called her son. Not because anything happened to him. Because something almost happened to me, a stranger, and she needed to hear his voice. That’s how close it was. Close enough that a doctor who sees bad nights for a living went home and made that call.

The helmet is still in my bag. Still perfectly usable. The puck found a gap the equipment didn’t account for, and the equipment came through fine.

I added a dangler after. A promise to my wife. Safer.

It took me three weeks to get back on the ice and when I did, I was afraid of the right circle. Every time someone loaded up to shoot, my mouth hung open like it was waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t stop it. It took a while for that to go away.

My friend waited up that night. I texted him from the parking lot at 1:30 that I was at my car. He was relieved. I drove to his place and we stood outside in the cold and dark and he told me about what happened after I left. Apparently nobody wanted to shoot on the other goalie for the rest of the game. They cut it short and went home. We stood there laughing about that, me in my skate shoes and stitches, him shaking his head at how quickly I’d gone from fine to gone and then somehow back to standing in his driveway at two in the morning looking more or less like a normal person.

That’s the part that’s genuinely hard to sit with.

I was holding my own neck on that bench. Applying pressure to stop the bleeding. There is a version of that night where I apply too much pressure, stop the blood to my own brain, and become a hockey fatality. A freak accident statistic at an eleven o’clock shinny game. A number in a report somewhere. The young guy in red spends years carrying a shot he didn’t do anything wrong on. My wife gets a phone call instead of a sleepy conversation in the dark.

That version isn’t hypothetical. It was the same night, the same bench, the same hands.

I don’t live with pain from this. No lasting damage, no real reminder except a scar that hides in my beard. I got out clean and drove myself home at two in the morning like it was nothing. Then I walked in the door and woke up my wife.

She wanted to know I was ok. Then she wanted to know why I forgot to wear the right equipment, why I’d taken the car and left her stranded, how we were going to make sure this never happened again. All fair questions. The last one doesn’t really have an answer. When she’d run out of things to be furious about, she told me to wash up and come to bed. She’d look at the stitches in the morning.

I’ve told the gory part of this story plenty. Got cut playing hockey, here’s the bloody equipment. I’ve told it like it’s a war story, something to pull out for shock value.

That’s not what it is.

I was the lucky one. The gap was there the whole time. I just didn’t know it until the puck found it.