Playoff Recap: S01P07 — The Final
The Final. One game. The Neon Crossing. The Tokyo Titans against the Montréal Maples, two teams that have done everything asked of them across an entire season and two rounds of playoff hockey, both of them still standing when the bracket ran out of games to give them. Sixty-minute periods, as The Final demands. The Ice, for the first time in this season, had nothing left to measure against.
What followed was unlike anything I have called in my career. C'est tout ce que je peux vous dire pour commencer.
TOK 11 — MTL 10 (OT)
Twenty-one goals. Fifty-one hits. Seven fights. Twenty-four penalties. And three times—once per regulation period, each time near the half-hour mark, each time without warning—The Puck paused the game and every player on the ice passed through The Sixth and was no longer here. The ice went quiet. H.O.R.N. had nothing further. Le Permanent Council issued no statement. And then play resumed, as it always does, because The Ice does not stop for us. We stop for it.
I will try to tell you what happened. I will not claim to have understood all of it.
The First Period
The Neon Crossing opened the way The Final should—with Sakura Shimizu hitting Jean-François Tremblay at 0:59, and again at 3:55, and the building making clear from the first shift that this would not be a measured evening. Shūta Tanaka scored at 8:22—Haruto Nakamura threading the pass, the first of his four assists—and Tokyo led. Mio Kobayashi took a penalty at 9:16. Sōta Watanabe and Jean-René Bergeron fought at 10:23 and both went off for five. And with Kobayashi still in The Sixth serving his time, Alexandre Paquette converted the power play at 12:04—Sarah-Maude Fortin with the assist—and Montréal were level.
Midway through the first period, the flare came. A wave of sixth-dimensional energy tore through The Neon Crossing without announcement and took every player on the ice with it—all thirty of them pulled into The Sixth simultaneously, leaving nothing on the ice but stillness. The building held the kind of silence that has no name. Then they came back, and the game resumed as though The Final hadn't just looked directly at something it couldn't explain.
Dmitri Volkov scored at 30:59—Marc-Antoine Dufresne with the assist, the first goal after the Sixth in The Final, scored into a building that hadn't quite caught its breath. One-two Montréal. Penalties came in sequence near the end of the period: Volkov at 38:07, Ren Inoue at 39:25, Fortin at 40:27. Lucas Pelletier capitalized at 40:38—Volkov assisting on the power play he'd earned by taking the earlier penalty. One-three. Then Jean-François Tremblay scored on another power play at 49:30—Fortin assisting—and Montréal led 1-4. Yūma Hayashi pulled one back at 50:56, Hina Takahashi feeding him, and Tokyo went into the second period trailing by two in The Final they'd played the entire season to reach.
The Second Period
Aoi Yamamoto scored at 14:49—Riku Mori threading it—and Tokyo were within one. Kaito Itō and Philippe Dubois fought at 9:32 and departed. Yuki Sato and Simon Côté fought at 13:51. Élodie Gagnon took a penalty at 12:55. Yūma Hayashi took one at 25:22. The building held its breath and the period accumulated its violence.
At 28:07, the flare came again. The same wave, the same taking—all thirty athletes gone into The Sixth and returned before the building had fully understood what it was watching. The second time was faster, or felt faster. Then Dubois scored at 29:12—Fortin with her third assist of the game—and the score was three-five Montréal, and the period kept moving, because what else would it do.
Itō converted on the power play at 34:06—Shimizu assisting, Tremblay in The Sixth—and suddenly it was 4-5. Kobayashi scored at 42:16—Shimizu's second assist—and Tokyo had tied it. Shimizu scored at 46:35—Nakamura with his second assist—and Tokyo led for the first time since Tanaka's opening goal. Six-five. The Neon Crossing made a sound I have not heard in a long time.
Pelletier leveled it at 48:41—Jean-René Bergeron assisting—and Shimizu and Côté fought at 53:32 because there was nothing else for it. Six-six. Two periods gone. Both teams had everything left to prove.
The Third Period
Hayashi and Pelletier fought at 0:12. Because of course they did. Because everything in this game happened before you were ready for it.
Chloé Moreau scored at 2:18—Tremblay with the assist—and Montréal led again. Yuki Sato answered twenty-one seconds later at 2:39, Nakamura threading his third assist. Seven-seven. Volkov scored at 6:37—Dubois assisting—and Montréal led again. Eight-eight would take until the 27th minute of the third period to come to pass, when Sato scored his second of the period—Nakamura with his fourth assist of the night, a fact that deserves a moment of stillness to absorb.
The third flare came at 27:52, after Sato's goal—whether because of it or despite it, I could not tell you. The same wave. The same silence. But by the third time, something in the building had changed: nobody screamed, nobody moved. We just waited, the way you wait for something you now know will pass. They came back. They always came back. The game resumed.
Sōta Watanabe scored at 29:49—Riku Mori assisting—and Tokyo led 9-8. Thirty players had been to The Sixth three times during The Final. Tokyo were ahead with thirty minutes to play.
Élodie Gagnon and Mei Fujita fought at 39:52. Moreau scored again at 51:55—Tremblay with another assist—and the game was level again at nine. Then Catherine Lavoie, who has been everywhere in this playoff run, scored at 52:25—Dubois assisting—and Montréal led 9-10 with seven minutes remaining in the third period of The Final.
Marc-Antoine Dufresne took a penalty at 55:43 and Aoi Yamamoto converted it at 56:24—Kobayashi assisting. Ten-ten. The Neon Crossing couldn't speak. Neither could I.
Overtime
Sixty minutes hadn't decided it. The overtime period of The Final runs as long as it takes, and it took thirty-five minutes and nineteen seconds.
Mio Kobayashi scored at 35:19. Aoi Yamamoto with the assist. The same pairing that had combined for the tying goal with four minutes remaining in regulation—Kobayashi setting up Yamamoto then, Yamamoto returning the favour now. The horn sounded. The building erupted. And somewhere in all of it, a season that had produced more than anyone expected arrived at the only place it could.
The Tokyo Titans are champions.
Kobayashi: two goals, one assist. Yamamoto: two goals, one assist, one hit. Nakamura: four assists, one hit—four different teammates scoring from his passes, a performance that will be studied. Volkov: two goals, one assist, two hits—the finest individual night of any Maple in a game that still wasn't enough. Shimizu: one goal, two assists, three hits, one fight—the engine of Tokyo's comeback through the second period.
Montréal scored ten goals in The Final and lost. There are no words for that that don't eventually run out. They will carry this season for a long time, which is the appropriate weight for what they built.
Les Titans sont champions. Félicitations, Tokyo.
I have called a lot of games. I have never called one like this.
Three periods of sixty minutes. Three visits from The Sixth, once per period, the same moment each time, the same silence each time. Twenty-one goals and no one who left The Neon Crossing tonight will be fully certain what they witnessed. I am not certain either. But Mio Kobayashi scored at 35:19 of overtime and The Neon Crossing became the loudest building I have ever been in, and that part I am certain of.
The Jambono will resurface. The intersaison begins. And when it ends, The Ice will appear again—this time in twenty-four cities, because the league is expanding, four new teams finding their buildings and their names and their first taste of what this is. Twenty-four teams will chase something that only one of them can carry home.
The Tokyo Titans are carrying it tonight. For the first time.
Bonne nuit. On se reverra la saison prochaine, avec vingt-quatre équipes.
—JM Laflèche, Voice of Hockay
Le Council acknowledges that The Final occurred. The Tokyo Titans have won the championship of Season One of Hockay. Le Council acknowledges that the game required four periods to resolve, that twenty-one goals were scored, and that sixth-dimensional flares swept the ice once per regulation period, taking all players with them on each occasion and returning them, which Le Council is logging as a series of events rather than a pattern, because acknowledging a pattern would require Le Council to have a theory, and Le Council does not have a theory. Le Council has not received a statement from The Puck. Le Council does not expect one until The Puck chooses to issue it. Le Council extends formal congratulations to the Tokyo Titans and acknowledges the extraordinary performance of both competing organisations. The intersaison has begun. The Jambono has resurfaced. Things are different now. We apologize. Le Council further confirms that Season Two will feature twenty-four teams, as expansion has been approved through the appropriate institutional channels and four new cities have been selected, the details of which will be announced in due course with the appropriate amount of ceremony and minimal explanation. The record has been updated accordingly. Season One is complete.