The penalty boxes have doors onto the ice with sensors on them, because a player who leaves the box early is a penalty and the league wants the record. Every night at about half past one the visitors' box door closes. Two minutes later, to the second, it opens, and the sensor logs a player going back onto the ice, and the box is empty, and the bench inside it has a dent in the padding the shape of somebody who sat down hard.
I am the off ice official who runs the penalty boxes at our rink on game nights, and on the nights there is no game I am the one the building rings about the door.
The boxes.
Two, one each side of the timekeeper, with a bench, a door onto the ice, and a sensor on the door that logs open and closed, and a button that the box attendant presses when a player's time is up so the board knows. A minor penalty is two minutes. The attendant opens the door at two and the player goes.
The visitors' door closes at about half past one every night. Two minutes later it opens. Exactly two. I have timed it against the atomic clock on my phone and it is two minutes to within a tenth.
What has been checked.
The door latch, replaced. The sensor, replaced. The door closes and opens.
The box, at half past one, by me, sitting in it, on the bench, where the attendant sits, which is beside where the player sits. The door closed. I did not touch it. And then the bench beside me took a weight. Hard. The way a player sits down in the box, which is angrily, with his stick between his knees, and the padding went down beside me, and stayed down, and I sat next to a dent in a bench for two minutes in an empty rink at half past one in the morning and I did not say anything, because you do not, to a player in the box, and at two minutes I pressed the button, because that is my job, and the door opened, and the dent came up, and the sensor logged a player through, and the door swung to.
The dent.
It is there in the morning, on nights I am not in the box. The padding pushed down in the shape of a large person sitting hard, and the padding is the kind that recovers in seconds, and it is still down at seven.
The box attendant on game nights, who is a woman who has done it for fifteen years, says she has never sat on the left end of that bench and would not, and that visiting players who sit there, some of them, get up and move along, and say the bench is wet, and it is not.
Who.
Our historian, the man with the programmes, knew the penalty before I had finished. A visiting player, a big defenceman, a long time ago, in a bad tempered game, who had taken a minor for roughing with two minutes left in the third and sat in our box and watched, from it, his team lose the game on a goal scored while he was sitting there, and had gone back onto the ice at the buzzer with nothing to go back to, and had, the historian said, not been right after, and had not played again, and had died in the way men like that died then, which he did not go into.
He is serving the two minutes. Every night. And he gets out on time, and there is no game to go back to, and he goes back anyway.
What is done about it.
The door is on the log every night as an unattended open and the league's data people have the visitors' box at our rink flagged for a sensor fault and have asked us to fix it and we have said we have.
What I do.
I run the boxes.
The attendant's job is to open the door at two. It is also, and nobody writes this down, to say something to the player as he goes, because a player coming out of the box is a player who wants to hit somebody and a word from the box sometimes stops him. The woman who does our games says, go on, you're out, or, easy now, and it works more than you would think.
I am in the box at half past one. The bench goes down beside me. I wait the two minutes. I do not look at him, because you do not. At two I press the button, and the door opens, and I say what she says, which is, easy now, you're out, and the dent comes up and the sensor logs him through.
The dent has stopped staying. That is the change. On the nights I am there and say it, the padding in the morning is flat, and on the nights I am not, it is down, and I have understood that the difference is the word, and that a man who sat in a box and watched his team lose and went back out with nothing has been going back out every night for years into an empty rink with nobody to tell him to take it easy, and I have been telling him, and he has, and I am going to have to find somebody to do it on my nights off.