by Jeff Buss
My son's face lit up when he saw the jersey. We were at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto for a tournament, and there it was: Ken Dryden's number 29, hanging in the mockup locker room of one of the most dominant teams in sports history. We'd listened to The Game on the drive up from DC, and both of us were hooked. My son was 11, loved the game, and was a goalie himself, so he already knew the particular stress that comes with being a netminder, the one defender whose every mistake is out there for everyone to see.
I texted him that picture again on the day Ken Dryden died, September 5, 2025, as a reminder of what playing that position teaches you. The humility and the invincibility, both in the same season. How fast you can go from hero to zero, and how you're never actually out of the fight.
I'm writing this almost exactly a year later, which feels like the right time to put down what his book gave me. Dryden won six Stanley Cups in eight seasons with the Montreal Canadiens, then walked away at thirty-one and spent the next several decades practicing law, writing, calling games on TV, and eventually serving in Canada's Parliament. He wrote The Game in 1983, and it still gets called the best sports book ever written, mostly because it barely qualifies as one. It's really a book about pressure and identity, and about the strange discipline of a job nobody notices until it goes wrong.
I first read it while I was teaching at the Naval Academy, coaching my son's team on the side, watching one kind of transformation happen in the classroom and another on the ice. Midshipmen were turning into officers in real time, heading off to defend our Nation, while my son was learning to play one of the hardest positions in sports. Dryden gave me language for both, and I still go back to it. Here's what stuck, from the book and from the life Dryden built after it.
Goalie is a lonely position. Long stretches of quiet get interrupted by a few seconds that decide everything, and there's nowhere to hide when it goes wrong. A goalie's mistakes are the most visible thing on the ice: one bad goal gets replayed for days, while a hundred great saves barely make the highlight reel. Nobody else takes the blame when the puck goes in, and you can't average your way out of a bad night. “Be a goldfish” I would tell him, you have to face the next shot with confidence. I saw the same thing with fighter and attack pilots after a rough flight or missing the wire, boltering, while trying to land on the aircraft carrier: confidence breaks, and no one’s coming to rebuild it but you. It's no different for the people defending America’s IT enterprises. Missing a critical alert that takes a company down is what is at stake and there is no room for error. It is a high stakes and high stress environment where excuses don’t matter.
Everybody on a team has a job, and the team only works if each person does theirs, especially the job nobody wants. Dryden's was about as hard as it gets in sports: one person standing in a small crease while everyone else got to skate. If he was the weakest link on a given night, everybody watching knew it. Showing up and doing the unglamorous part of the job for years is mostly what winning looks like. Dryden didn’t win the games, the team did, he just focused on being exceptional at his position and was blessed with an incredible team around him. In our world, that's the analyst who actually reads the log after 10 hours of being on a shift, or the engineer who fixes something quietly before it ever becomes a headline.
No coach sends the JV goalie out for Game 7. Nobody would even float the idea. But plenty of businesses do exactly that without noticing they've done it. The goalie is the position most likely to get ignored, because for long stretches nothing tests it. A company that hired one person to "handle security" three years ago, and hasn't touched the setup since, doesn't get a pass because the rest of the business grew. It's the same net, bigger now, with more shots coming at it every year and the same guy standing in front of it. Right sizing the cybersecurity budget is the first decision, and every decision after it depends on getting that one right.
I think about the other side of the ice too, the shooters looking for the gap. There's always someone faster or better trained coming at the net with something you haven't seen. But the ways a goalie actually gets beaten don't change nearly as often as the players trying to do it. Once you know them, your job is knowing the trends and methods better than the people trying to exploit them, and that's as true walking into a rink as it is defending a network. Keeping the puck out is only half of it. How you respond when something gets through matters just as much.
Dryden walked away from hockey at thirty-one, right when most players are just hitting their stride, and never looked back. He'd proven what he needed to prove, six Cups, five Vezinas, and he didn't need a seventh season to tell him who he was. I left the military for very different reasons, at a very different scale, but it came down to the same math: give something everything you've got for as long as it needs you, then go find out what else you can build. Running Cyberleaf ended up being my answer, still defending, just for America’s businesses instead of the nation. People still know Dryden as a goalie first. He just never let that be all he was, and I respect that.
From the HHOF photo archives — Ken Dryden of the Montreal Canadiens strikes his iconic pose.
He was famous for a stance nobody else in hockey ever copied: leaning on his stick between plays, watching the game from his place between the pipes with a stillness that made him look almost bored. But when the play came to him, that stillness vanished. He turned explosive, relentless, nothing like the guy who'd been leaning on his stick a second earlier. He played every night like the last one hadn't happened, good or bad, and he never let one bad night become the story. When the stakes were highest and the team needed the save that decides everything, he made it. Six times over. Six Cups.
I'm grateful for what Dryden taught me about The Game. The one we're playing now is higher stakes, and it's the operators on our watchfloor, playing their position every day and every night, who keep America defended. It's awesome to watch a great team do that, whether it was the Canadiens in the '70s or it's Cyberleaf today.