They are a brutal, glorious disaster, and Lourdes fits in perfectly there, because Lourdes doesn’t play clean, Lourdes doesn’t play careful. He’ll shovel the puck in for filthy, ugly goals, he’ll take out a star winger at centre ice and look startled when he gets called for interference, he’ll sulk like a child when he boards someone and lands up in the box for it. But no one awards prizes for pretty goals, and no one takes points away for brutality, and he just keeps racking up the points, until people are murmuring about the Calder a month in, as if that isn’t grossly premature.

When David has a two-point game, he’s asked afterwards if he saw Lourdes notch four points in a blowout against Toronto. When David lands in the box for the first time, he’s asked if he’s adapting to Lourdes’ playstyle. Lourdes plays cheap. It’s hard to watch. David doesn’t know why everyone’s crowing about it. A goal’s a goal, maybe, but David refuses to be the sort of player who hacks his way to the Calder. He’d rather sit where he is, and know that at least he doesn’t play the way Jake Lourdes does.

They host the Panthers on the 19th of November, and the amount of media David faces before the game is absurd. They have a game against the Rangers in two days, a better team, a harder team to face, a divisional rival, and the team’s focused on that, just like they should be, but the media is more interested in the supposed rivalry between Lourdes and Chapman.

David didn’t realise how much they’d made of their little storyline until every single question that he fields before the game is about Lourdes. How David feels about finally playing Lourdes. How David feels about going second in the draft. How David feels about Lourdes being first again, sprinting past the other rookies in points.

David says the usual polite nothing Hockey Canada drilled into him, the non-committal, boring responses that no one’s looking for but everyone’s expecting, and then the truth, which sounds as non-committal as everything else: he’s going to play his game, and that doesn’t change just because Lourdes is on the ice.

The game is a disaster, even though the scoreboard may not say so. Knutsen shows up to play, and it’s a good thing he does, because the rest of the team collapses in front of him. They spend all their time in their own zone or frantically trying to get out of their zone, just to fall back whenever someone on the Panthers nudges it right back in.

At the end of the second it’s still tied at zero, but the Panthers have 28 shots to their pitiful 10. Coach Bauer rides them like they’re in the middle of a blowout loss, which is what they deserve, as much as they deserve the look on Knutsen’s face, tight jawed and determined. He’s not talking to anyone but his back-up, trying to stay in the zone so he can keep bailing them out.