A/N: I love my reviewers. Y'all are so sweet and awesome. I love you! And I still don't own Miracle. That's just a fact of life these days.

Okay and one other thing: This chapter is dedicated to my amazing beta Emador who has faithfully stuck with this story for months and also helped create the character of Emily Sibley-McClanahan. (Rob's wife)

Jack's POV

It was January of 2003 and Disney was making a movie about the 1980 hockey team. Some production people for the movie had arranged for the actors to meet with the players they were portraying so they could get to know us better and understand our quirks. So a young man from Boston named Michael Mantenuto was coming to visit my family in our home in suburban Chicago.

I'd been married to the love of my life, Elizabeth Grace McClanahan-O'Callahan since 1981. And we had six amazing children. Our oldest, Heidi Louise, is almost twenty-four. Stephen John was born on May 14, 1982. Robert Michael was born February 12, 1984. Maria Isabella was born on June 24, 1986. Anna Christina joined our family on April 29, 1988. And our youngest, the surprise, Abigail Rose came into the world on February 11, 1997.

Heidi had graduated from the University of Illinois in 2000 with a bachelor's in nursing; she had so many AP credits that she entered college as a sophomore. In June of 2000, Heidi had married her high school boyfriend, Luke Wood. Luke and Heidi lived about half an hour away from us now. Heidi gave birth to their first child in March of 2001, a wonderful baby boy they named Nicholas John. In November of 2002, Nicholas got a baby sister named Sarah Olivia. Having two grandchildren when I was 45 made me feel a little old, but then I was only twenty-two years older than Heidi.

Heidi was tall, which came from her biological parents, and slender, which came from the fact that she'd been an athlete since she was four years old and put on her first pair of ice skates. She still had dark brown hair and green eyes and everyone who met her said she looked just like Ellie except for her eyes.

Stephen, who preferred to be called Steve, was twenty and a junior at Loyola University in Chicago, where he was working on a degree in business. He didn't have a steady girlfriend or any prospects of giving Ellie and me any grandchildren anytime soon. He was tall and built like me. He was the one who resembled me the most out of all our children. He had light brown hair and blue eyes.

Robert was eighteen and a freshman at Boston University, which he told me he picked to honor me. He wanted to be a high school math teacher. Ellie said that any and all mathematic ability our children had came from me and not from her. She was the science whiz of the house; I was the resident math whiz. Robert was tall and slender from years of running. He had his mother's dark brown hair and my blue eyes. He had spent four years of high school being followed everywhere by girls, but was currently single, being new in Boston.

Maria, who went by Maribella, was sixteen and a junior in high school. Her latest accomplishments were her driver's license and dating the same guy-Ben Jackson-since September. Maribella was the one who really looked like Ellie. She had dark brown hair and eyes and she was petite, just like her mother.

Anna was fourteen and a freshman in high school. She was the redhead of our family. She had auburn hair and blue eyes, which came from my Irish heritage-probably. She was the real skater in the family. She had been skating since she was four, just like her siblings, but she had taken to skating like a fish to water and was now skating competitively.

Abby was five and in kindergarten. She was small and looked like a miniature of Maribella. Abby had been a surprise. After Anna was born, Ellie and I had decided we were done having children; five was enough. Then, on our fifteenth wedding anniversary, Ellie found out that she was ten weeks pregnant. She was thirty-eight, well, we were both thirty-eight-but she was thirty-eight and pregnant. And then, Abby showed up the day before Robert's thirteenth birthday. Robert decided that she was an acceptable birthday present.

Michael Mantenuto was coming over for dinner the second Friday in January. And I was running late that night. I had a meeting with a client that had gone much longer than expected.

Ellie's POV

We were expecting company for dinner and Jack was running late. Michael was coming over at six and Jack had called me at five-thirty telling me that he wouldn't be home until six-thirty. And then Rob called just as the doorbell rang.

"Emily told me last week that Trina was going to get her cast off soon," I said as the doorbell rang. "Do you know when yet? Anna, get the door would you?"

"Just a minute, Mom," she called. "I just need to finish this email to Lauren and then I'll get it."

"I'll get it Mommy!" Abby yelled. "I'm in the living room already."

"It sounds like chaos over there," Rob said.

"That's for sure," I told him. "Michael Mantenuto is coming over for dinner to meet with Jack, but Jack's running late and Abby's answering the door and Heidi and Luke are coming over, but I don't know when."

"I thought Jack told me that Luke was going to pick Michael up."

"He is, but I don't know when Heidi's getting here and with the babies and everything, I'd like to know when they're getting here."

"I know how you feel," my brother replied. "Whenever Logan and Kate bring Jason over, Emily turns into a nervous wreck." Logan had married his high school girlfriend, Kate, the summer after his junior year of college and their son Jason was born in June of 2002.

"Mommy, Luke is here with the guy who wants to see Daddy," Abby said as she came into the kitchen dragging my son-in-law, Luke, behind her with someone I guessed must have been Michael Mantenuto following behind them.

"Hey, Mom," Luke said, hugging me. Luke is tall and thin from years of running. He met Heidi when they were both on their school's cross country teams. He has dark brown hair and eyes.

"It's good to see you, Luke. Do you know when Heidi will get here?" I asked.

He smiled. "Ever the nervous grandmother, Mrs. OC, don't worry. They should be here soon. Heidi said she was leaving the house around five-thirty, so she'll be here soon."

"Okay, if you say so," I said.

Luke patted me on the back. "Don't worry. She'll be fine; she knows what she's doing. Now, Mom, I want you to meet Michael Mantenuto. Mike, this is my wonderful mother-in-law, Ellie McClanahan-O'Callahan."

I smiled and shook his extended hand. "It's nice to meet you, Michael."

"Nice to meet you too, Mrs. O'Callahan," he said. "And please call me Mike."

"All right, Mike it will be," I replied. "And please call me Ellie. Mrs. O'Callahan is my mother-in-law."

Abby was tugging on my arm. "Mommy, can I talk to Uncle Rob? Please?"

"Just a minute," I told her. "Rob, can Abby talk to you? She misses you."

"She just saw me at Christmas three weeks ago," my brother replied. "But what the heck? She is my favorite five-year-old niece."

I handed my youngest daughter the phone. "Okay, Abby, don't talk your Uncle Rob's ear off."

"Yes, Mommy," she said as she ran out of the room with the cordless phone.

"Is she yours?" Mike asked me as I stirred the rice.

I nodded. "She's my youngest. Luke is married to my oldest."

"That must be quite an age gap," he said.

"It's eighteen years," I told him. "Heidi is twenty-three and Abby is five."

"How many children do you have?"

"Six," I replied. "We have four girls and two boys."

He nodded. "Are they all going to be here for dinner tonight?"

Luke shook his head. "Nope, Robert goes to school in Boston and Steve is busy. You just get to meet all the girls and the grandchildren."

"How many grandchildren do you and Mr. O'Callahan have?" Mike asked.

"Just two," I replied.

"You don't look old enough to be a grandmother," he said.

I smiled. "You're just trying to butter me up."

"No, I'm not," he protested. "I'm serious. You do not look old enough to be anyone's grandmother. You don't look old enough to have a daughter who is old enough to be anyone's mother."

"Heidi's adopted," Luke told him. "But she was born just after Ellie graduated from college."

Mike nodded as Abby came back into the kitchen with the phone and announced, "Trina's getting her cast off in two weeks. Uncle Rob said he'll call you back later when he can talk to you in peace and quiet. Does that mean I'm noisy?"

I took the phone from her as Luke picked her up and smiled at her. "No, it doesn't mean that you're noisy. It just means that the house is loud, busy, and chaotic and now isn't a good time for them to talk on the phone."

"Okay, that's good," Abby said, hugging her brother-in-law. "Mommy, Anna told you that she'd be downstairs like ten minutes ago and she's still upstairs talking to Lauren."

"Yes, Abby, I know."

"Do you want me to go get her? She's not supposed to be online for more than an hour at a time. Daddy's still mad at her for talking to Ryan until three in the morning last week."

I nodded. "Yes, sweetheart, I know."

"Well, aren't you going to go yell at her?"

Just then the front door opened and Heidi walked in carrying Sarah on her hip and leading Nicholas by the hand. Luke immediately put Abby down and rushed to help his wife. Abby took that opportunity to run upstairs-probably to yell at Anna for being on the computer too long. And then the garage door slammed as Maribella came in, having just got home from volleyball practice. "Mom, remind me to tell Dad that the Mazda could use some gas," she said as she threw her keys on the table and tossed her coat on top of them. "Oh, and can Ben come over for dinner on Saturday? His parents are going away for the weekend and he's just going to have frozen pizza for dinner."

"Sure, honey, just tell him to be here by five-thirty," I told her. "Oh, and Maribella, Stephen is going to be home this weekend, so you might want to talk to your father about making your brother toe the line."

She smiled and hugged me. "You're the best, Mom." Then she saw Mike. "Are you the guy playing my dad in that movie?"

"Mike Mantenuto, I'd like you to meet my daughter, Maribella O'Callahan," I interjected. "Maribella, this is Mike Mantenuto."

"It's nice to meet you, Mike," my daughter said shaking his hand.

"Nice to meet you too," he replied.

"And this is my older sister, Heidi," Maribella continued. "She's married to Luke, who I assume you've already met, and she has two children, Nicholas and Sarah." As she said that, Maribella scooped Sarah out of Heidi's arms and kissed the baby's forehead.

Heidi smiled. "Mike, forgive my sister. She doesn't know when to stop talking."

"It's all right," Mike told her.

I noticed then that he had the same Boston drawl that my husband still had even though he hadn't lived in Boston for twenty-three years. Jimmy Craig always said of Jack that you "can take the boy out of Boston, but you can't take the Boston out of the boy."

"I'm going to take Heidi and the kids into the living room and help them put their coats away," Maribella told me.

"Why don't you have Luke do that?" I told her. "I want you to run upstairs and get Anna off the computer and while you're at it, tell Abby to leave Anna alone. And if you have to drag Abby back down here, go for it."

At that Maribella, Heidi, and Luke all left the kitchen, leaving Mike and me alone. "Where did Maribella's name come from?" he asked. "It's not a name you hear every day."

"Her real name is Maria Isabella," I told him as I stirred the rice. "When she was little, Jack used to sing this song to her about his beautiful Maria and Mike Eruzione heard this song once and he was singing it to her for some reason but he was singing it 'mi Maria bella' instead of 'my beautiful Maria' and my son Stephen heard him singing it. So one day, Stephen was singing the song to her with Rizzo's words, but he sang 'mi Maribella' and that just kind of stuck."

"I see," he said. "It's interesting because I'm trying to find out all these little things about your husband so I can portray him more accurately. And I have all kinds of questions I want to ask you because I know you were around the team a lot before the Olympics."

I nodded. "I'll do my best but you have to remember that Heidi was the number one focus of my life then and I wasn't around for everything. Like Norway, don't ask me about Norway; I've never been there."

"You didn't go with the team?" he asked.

"No, I was too busy and I actually ended up being sick that week anyway."

Just then, Anna burst into the kitchen closely followed by Abby. "Mom," my fourteen-year-old moaned. "Abby is being a pest. She keeps bugging me and she keeps telling me I have to get off the computer and she's being a total brat and honestly I don't see why you and Dad had to have her in the first place. I mean there is such a thing as controlling yourselves. She's so annoying and Maribella comes up and tells me that you want me to get off the computer and I don't see why because I told you I was emailing Lauren and okay I was also talking to Stephanie, but it's not that big a deal. I mean I'll be off the computer by the time Dad gets home and wants to use it."

"And people think that I talk too much," Maribella said. She had come in at some point during Anna's monologue.

"Well you do," Anna said. "You talk on and on about Ben and you have no sympathy for those of us who are single. Honestly, you'd think you didn't care about your sister."

"Anna, please stop and breathe for five minutes," I told her. "Maribella, would you take Abby and Mike into the living room so I can talk to your sister in peace?"

"Sure thing," my second oldest daughter said. "Hey, Mike, do you want to play a game with Abby and me? All she knows how to play is Go Fish."

"I haven't played Go Fish in a long time," he told her as they headed out of the room. "But I guess I could try."

"I'll teach," Abby told him. "Don't worry. I'm really good at Go Fish."

Jack's POV

I walked into my house at six-thirty to mass pandemonium. My wife was in the kitchen yelling at my fourteen-year-old daughter about overusing the computer-which Anna had really been doing lately. She was always online talking to her friends especially Lauren and Stephanie and her mother and I were starting to be a little more than concerned about the situation especially since the week before she had stayed up until three in the morning on a Wednesday talking to a boy.

Then I walked into the living room. Abby and Maribella were playing Go Fish on the floor with a young man who I suspected was Michael Mantenuto. Well, it looked like Maribella and Michael were playing the game while Abby enjoyed a not-so-quiet game of fifty-two card pickup with herself. She was throwing the cards up in the air and squealing as she did this. Of course, some of this act might have been for the benefit of my almost two-year-old grandson, Nicholas, who was sitting near her watching with great delight as the cards flew up in the air and then quickly fell back to the ground again. Luke and Heidi were on the couch with Sarah and Heidi was watching her youngest sister with a look that distinctively said, "Well, she's not my kid, so I don't have to yell at her."

I put down my briefcase and got down at my youngest daughter's level. Abby looked up at me with her mother's big brown eyes. "Hi, Daddy!" she said with a smile. "This person, Mr. Michael Man-Ten-Use-Oh is going to play you in a movie. I don't think he looks like you. You're too old to be him and he has too much hair to be you."

"Okay, I'll keep that in mind," I told her. "Now would you mind doing me a favor, Abby?"

"Sure, Daddy, what do you want?"

"Can you pick up those cards and put them away so that Nicholas doesn't eat them or anything?"

She nodded and set about cheerfully picking up the cards while singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb".

"Dad," Maribella said to me. "This is Michael Mantenuto. Mr. Mantenuto, this is my dad, Jack O'Callahan."

Michael smiled and shook my hand. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. O'Callahan."

I scratched my head nervously and smiled. "Please, call me Jack. Mr. O'Callahan is my father. And it's nice to meet you too, Michael."

"Actually, I prefer Mike, if you don't mind."

"Not at all, one of my best friends in college was Mike," I told him.

"Uncle Rizzo?" Abby asked. "I miss Uncle Rizzo. When can we go visit him?"

"Maybe this summer," I told her.

"Oh goodie!" she squealed. "I want to go see Paul and Mike; I like their piggyback rides." She handed me the deck of cards. "And here you go, Daddy. I cleaned them all up."

I took the cards and gave them to Luke who put them on the coffee table. Mike looked at her. "Do you like piggyback rides?"

"Do you know how to give piggyback rides?" she asked him. "My daddy gives good piggyback rides but it's not good for his knee. He hurt it in the Olympics when Heidi was a baby. And Luke doesn't know how to give GOOD piggyback rides. Steve and Robert give good piggyback rides, but they're not home."

"I have three younger sisters," Mike told her. "I used to give them piggyback rides."

"Do they think you give good piggyback rides?"

"They've never complained."

"Okay," she said eagerly. "Can I have one now?"

Just then Ellie came into the room and Mike said, "Why don't we wait until after dinner? I think your mom is ready to serve dinner."

And she was.

After dinner, Mike gave Abby a piggyback ride that she declared to be "almost as good as Daddy's". Ellie and I went into my study with Mike to talk to him for a while. "Heidi might come in later, but she doesn't remember anything really. She just remembers things from later," I told him.

He seemed to be fine with that. "So," Ellie began. "Why don't you tell us a little about yourself?"

"Well, I'm the oldest of four kids," he began. "I was born in Holliston, Massachusetts. My dad taught me to skate as soon as I could walk. He loves hockey. He used to be the assistant principal and hockey coach at Holliston High School, but he had a stroke in 1993 that almost killed him. He's recovered pretty well, but he'll never be the same. Now, he's a hall monitor at another high school."

Ellie nodded sympathetically. "What about your mom?"

"She's a therapist."

"So is Ellie," I told him.

Mike looked at us. "Are you serious?"

My wife nodded. "I was actually the team physical therapist for the 1980 team."

"She took good care of us though," I said. "She was therapist, mother, and sister to all of us."

Mike laughed. "So, what else can I tell you?"

"Do your sisters skate?" Ellie asked.

"Yep, all three of them do. My dad taught us all how to skate as soon as it was possible."

"Where did you go to college?" I asked him.

"I started at the University of Maine and I played hockey there for a while. But then I transferred to the University of Massachusetts-Boston. And then this happened, so I'll finish my degree someday, but I'm not sure when."

"Is there anything else you want to tell us?" Ellie asked. "Or do you want to start interrogating us?"

Mike smiled. "I have a question. Are you guys Catholic? The reason I ask is there are crosses in all the rooms and you have pictures of saints in the living room."

"Yeah, we are Catholic," I told him. "I was raised Catholic and Ellie and Heidi became Catholic about a year after we got married."

"Which saints are those paintings of?" he asked.

"We have St. John the Evangelist, St. Patrick, St. Elizabeth, St. Louis, St. Stephen, St. Michael, St. Anna, St. Rose of Lima, Mary, the Mother of God, St. Robert Bellarmine, and St. Isabel of France," Ellie explained. "They are the patrons of everyone in the family. In their rooms, the kids have their Confirmation saints as well."

"Whose patron is St. Louis?"

"Heidi's," I said. "Her middle name is Louise. She says St. Louis is fine, but she prefers her Confirmation Saint."

"Who is that?"

"St. Clare of Assisi," Ellie said. "That's funny though because Stephen's Confirmation name is Francis from St. Francis of Assisi."

Mike nodded.

Ellie's POV (honestly the only reason I switched POV is I was getting bored of Jack after three pages of his POV)

Then Mike started asking us questions about the Olympics. He was very interested in Jack's relationship with his teammates-especially Rob-and his relationship with Herb. Jack laughed when Mike brought up Herb. "Was he as distant from the team as everyone says he was?"

Jack nodded. "He kept his distance from us. We never really got to know him personally. It was strange; I've never had a coach like that before. He rarely even showed emotion in front of us. I know that he was trying to force us to unite as a team, but it was just odd."

My memories of Herb during those months are different than anyone else's. I remember him as the man who was distant but also took the time to care about me and all the crap in my life. He knew about the demise of my parents' marriage as it happened. He knew about Rob's struggles. Herb Brooks had been a better parent to Rob and me than our real father had. I'd known him since I was fourteen and I'd babysat Danny and Kelly for years. Even now when I go back to St. Paul, I visit with Patti and Herb, Danny and his family, and Kelly and her family. But I knew that Herb had treated the 1980 team differently than he'd treated any other team.

Mike looked at me. "Is it true that you asked that the story of your relationship with the team be kept out of the movie?"

I nodded. "If you include me in the movie, then you have to include my relationship with Jack. And if you include my relationship with Jack, you have to include Rob's relationship with Emily, Rizzo and Gabby, Rammer and Erin, Bah and Vanessa, Johnson and Nina, and Buzzy and Gayle and it just becomes too much."

"Did Mike Eruzione marry the woman he was dating during the Olympics?"

Jack took that one. "He did. Rizzo and Gabby were married in 1982 and their oldest child, Michael Junior, was born in 1984, and Paul was born in 1988. Gabby died in 1995 of cancer, leaving Rizzo heartbroken. He's learned to live with it but I don't think he'll ever really recover from it."

We talked to Mike for a few more hours. He liked hearing stories about people on the team and how everyone picked on Bah. He loved hearing about the games of twenty questions on the way to Lake Placid and about Jack being the "tailless wonder". "If your cast can have half the fun that the boys had back in the day, you guys will be the best of friends for the rest of your lives," I told him.

"Do you remember the monosyllabic sheep dating the endless stream of yammering?" Jack asked me.

I laughed. "Somehow, they've managed to survive over twenty years of marriage without her talking him to death. I'm not sure how they did it." I turned to Mike. "We're talking about Bah and Vanessa Harrington."

"He rarely talks; she never stops talking," Jack said. "And they have two daughters who are silent like their dad and two sons who never stop talking; it's amusing."

Mike smiled. "It sounds like it."

Just then I looked at the clock. "It's almost ten and I need to make sure that Maribella put Abby to bed."

"And check that Anna isn't on the computer in our room," Jack told me. "I want to talk to her tomorrow about her excessive computer use."

"All right," I replied. "Good night, Mike. It was nice meeting you."

"Actually, there was one other thing I wanted to talk to you both about really quickly."

"All right," I said, sitting back down.

"This might make you not like me very much," he began. "But I should probably tell you this. My girlfriend and I are expecting a baby together in a few months. We aren't planning to get married because we're not sure that we love each other like that and I'm not really sure where this relationship is going, but I just want to be up front with you about this."

My husband nodded. "Okay, I'm fine with that."

"Are you sure?" Jack asked. "I know you're Catholics and Catholics don't approve of having sex before you're married."

"That's true, but in our house we also believe in accepting people where they are," I told him as I stood up. "Don't worry about us. Now I really do need to go check on my daughters. Good night, Mike; it was nice meeting you."

He stood up and shook my hand. "It was nice meeting you too."

And then I went to check on my daughters.

A/N: Okay, one more chapter left; that's mostly just an epilogue to tell you guys what the rest of the team is up too. You've gotten hints of what's going on with Bah, Rizzo, and Mac, but the next chapter will mostly just let you know what's going on with everyone.