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.

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.