Yesterday was the expected day when we might lose one, two, or, remotely, all three of our boys. The last scenario was so unlikely that I barely gave it a thought. Yet, in junior hockey, nothing is impossible. We do our part and let the hockey people do theirs. We keep food on the table, water chilled in the fridge, and a reasonably comfortable place for the boys to sleep. Sometimes, the rest is completely out of our hands. And sometimes, completely unrelated events have a strange way of tying the day together.

Per my commitment to myself, I stayed in bed until the boys had left. I took my walk, ran some errands, and still heard nothing that gave me any clarity about whether one of our boys had been cut. I was beginning to hope we might somehow avoid this particular round of cuts, but then the call from the billet coordinator came. We made a feeble attempt at small talk before she cut through it with, “When people see a call from me, they know it isn’t good news.” She was right. The most recent addition to our household was no longer a member of the team and would be leaving us soon.

Before the call, I had started cutting up vegetables for dinner. I was planning on cubed and roasted sweet potatoes with rosemary and broccoli when I realized I also had two and a half heads of cauliflower. Apparently, I had been preparing for a cauliflower shortage that never materialized. The cauliflower went into the oven after being made a little more roasting-friendly and sprinkled with paprika. It wasn’t likely to be wildly popular with the hockey boys, but our son and daughter-in-law would probably find it tasty.

Everything was somewhere in the roasting process when the call came about our player being cut. We let him know how sorry we were and were grateful that the coach was already working to help find him another team. Meanwhile, the vegetables were consuming most of our available roasting pans, so my wife improvised. She covered a round pizza pan with foil for the salmon. Since the other vegetables were still hogging the oven space, she put the salmon in at a slight angle. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution at the time.

It was not.

The angle turned out to be the catalyst for a great deal of excitement. Oil and grease from the salmon and its marinade leaked down into the bottom of the oven. My wife barely had time to notice that the oven was smoking before the situation graduated to a full-blown fire. Somewhere between the smoke and the flames, the vegetables were removed from the oven. Somewhere between the fire being doused with salt and the contents of a fire extinguisher, all of the interconnected smoke alarms started chirping together.

All of them except the one in our bedroom, which had been removed a few months earlier after deciding that replacing its battery was merely a suggestion and that chirping indefinitely was its true calling.

At this point, it didn’t matter that it was 100 degrees outside and somewhere in the mid-70s inside. We needed to get the smoke out. The front of the house was opened up to the elements, and the windows at the back of the house were opened to give the smoke a clear path to the great outdoors. Unfortunately, some flies apparently found our new ventilation system irresistible and decided to move in.

After a few minutes, the hockey boys finally emerged from their second-floor cave to see what the smoke alarms were singing about. The smell of smoke was not lost on them. I thought, “Stick to cornhole, boys. You don’t seem like firemen material.” One of the boys was making an airport run, so he missed all of the excitement. He may still have a future in firefighting.

As we worked our way through dinner, I gradually closed windows and doors, hoping I could get the house back down to an acceptable temperature by bedtime. Dinner itself was uneventful. Frankly, after seeing flames somewhere other than the grill, nothing else about the meal was going to seem particularly dramatic.

Our daughter and granddaughter left right after dinner. We wanted to make sure they were gone before we opened the oven. If there was going to be another round of smoke, we preferred to deal with it without a toddler in the middle of the operation. Fortunately, there wasn’t any more smoke. My wife, however, was not convinced. She went from room to room, convinced the entire house was still a disaster area. I suspected her clothes or hair might have been carrying the smell around, but my wife thinks what she thinks. Her nose had completely lost the scent by the next morning, so apparently the house survived its inspection.

My wife eventually ended the adventure by posting a picture on Facebook. Her initial comment didn’t seem to take responsibility for the fire, but in the replies, she owned the circumstances that created it. I have made enough mistakes in my life without having people assume this was another episode of Andy screwing something up.

Our hockey boy, meanwhile, had no one to blame for being cut from the team. The coach was working with his advisor to try to find a team willing to trade for him. Would he stay with us for a couple of days? Would he be in limbo until another team became available? We didn’t know. His problem didn’t have nearly as simple a resolution as our oven problem.

Once the fire was out, we could clean up the mess. We could remove the burned material, wipe down the oven, and eventually get things back to normal. We had some control over the variables. Once our hockey boy was essentially “fired” from the team, he had far less control over what came next. He had to depend on another team being willing to take a chance on him and find a place for his skill level. And through all of that, he would need to maintain a positive attitude while dealing with whatever other hiccups the season decided to throw at him.

That is where the two stories really came together for me.

We may have lost the use of our oven until my wife gets around to cleaning out the sins of yesterday. But when you are a hockey boy in our house, you are here as long as you need to be while you figure out what the next steps are going to look like. Our oven may have had a fire, and the team may have fired our hockey boy, but we aren’t going to burn our relationship with him while he figures out where he goes from here.

With no oven, our last meal with him may not be pizza.

But we’ll make sure it is a good one.