No position in team sport is as cruelly isolated as goaltending. For long stretches the goalie is essentially a fan in expensive equipment, and then, without warning, the entire game collapses onto the last two feet of ice he is paid to protect.
Boredom Is the Hardest Save
The physical reflexes are trainable; the mental ones are not, quite. The real test is staying ready through forty minutes of nothing so that the one shot that matters does not catch a mind that wandered. Concentration without action is its own elite skill.
The puck is easy. Staying awake for the puck — that is the career.
A goaltending coach
When it goes wrong it goes wrong publicly and alone, a red light and a silent bench. When it goes right, the save looks like instinct, though it was really an hour of refused boredom paying off at once.
Everyone watches the highlight stop. Almost no one understands that the save was made during the thirty-nine quiet minutes before it.
