The Goal That Won't Leave Your Head

How to Stop Dwelling on Soft Goals — and What to Do Instead

There's a moment every goalie knows.

The puck goes in and you know — before the horn even sounds — that you should have had it. Maybe it went five-hole on a nothing shot from the point. Maybe it squeaked under your arm on a routine glove save. Maybe you just lost it in traffic and never picked it up again.

Whatever it was, it wasn't some cross-crease one-timer that nobody in the world is saving. It was the other kind. The kind that replays in your head on a loop.

The soft goal.

I played 12 seasons in the NHL. And I can still describe soft goals I let in during my rookie year. Not because I'm obsessing over them — but because the position imprints those moments on your brain in a way no other position does. A defenseman can turn the puck over and nobody in the building might even notice. A forward can fan on a one-timer and the play moves on. But when a goalie lets in a weak goal, the red light goes on, the horn blares, and 18,000 people react at the same time. The scoreboard changes. Your teammates look at you. There's no hiding from it.

And here's what makes goaltending truly different from every other position in every sport: you don't get a timeout. You don't get to step off the mound. The puck drops in 15 seconds and the game continues whether your head is right or not.

So the question isn't whether you're going to let in soft goals. You are. Every goalie who has ever played at any level has. The real question is: what happens next?

Why "Just Forget About It" Doesn't Work

I can't tell you how many times I heard some version of this growing up. A coach walks by and says, "Shake it off." A parent in the car says, "Don't worry about it." Your teammate taps your pads and says, "Next one."

They mean well. But that advice is incomplete — and in a lot of cases, it actually makes the problem worse.

Here's why. When you tell your brain to forget something, it does the opposite. It fixates. It replays the goal in higher definition. It starts adding a storyline: I always let in goals like that. My team is going to lose confidence in me. My coach is going to pull me. You're not moving on. You're spiraling. And now instead of dealing with one soft goal, you're dealing with the weight of your entire identity as a goalie — in the 15 seconds before the next faceoff.

The brain doesn't have a delete button. You can't just flush it. But you can train yourself to do something far more effective.

You can learn to compartmentalize.

What Compartmentalization Actually Means

In The Crease Mindset, I talk about compartmentalization as the single most important mental skill a goalie can develop. It's not about pretending the goal didn't happen. It's about putting it in its own box — acknowledging it, accepting it, and then choosing not to carry it into the next play.

The best goalies I played with and against in the NHL all had this in common. It wasn't that they never let in bad goals. Every goalie in the league has nights where a puck finds a way through that shouldn't. The difference was what happened after. Their next-save percentage after a bad goal was elite — because they had trained themselves to separate the event from their emotional response to it.

A goal against is an event. It's not a reflection of who you are. And when young goalies start understanding that distinction, everything changes.

The 3-Breath Reset: A Real Action Plan

I'm going to give you a framework that I used throughout my career and that I teach every goalie I work with today. I call it the 3-Breath Reset. It's simple. It's fast. And it works under pressure — which is the only time it matters.

Breath 1: Acknowledge

Let yourself feel it. For one breath, you're allowed to be frustrated. You're allowed to think, "I should have had that." Don't fight the feeling. Suppressing it is what makes it linger. One breath. Feel it. Own it.

Breath 2: Release

On the second breath, you let it go — physically. I used to scrape the crease with my skate. Some goalies tap their posts. Some squeeze their glove and open it. The specific action doesn't matter. What matters is that you attach a physical cue to the mental release. Your body tells your brain: that chapter is closed.

Breath 3: Refocus

This is the most important one. On the third breath, you redirect your attention to something specific and task-relevant. Not "I need to be better." That's too vague. Something concrete: Where is the puck? Where is the play developing? What's my positioning? You go from evaluative thinking — judging yourself — back to process thinking — doing your job.

Three breaths. Maybe four or five seconds total. That's all the time you have between a goal and the next faceoff. But if you practice this enough — and I mean truly practice it, not just read about it — it becomes automatic. It becomes your default response.

How to Practice This Off the Ice

The 3-Breath Reset isn't something you try for the first time in a game. You train it. Here's how.

Visualization sessions. Sit somewhere quiet. Close your eyes. Picture yourself in a game. Now picture the softest, most embarrassing goal you can imagine — five-hole on a wrist shot from the blue line with no screen. Feel the frustration rise. Then walk yourself through the three breaths. Acknowledge. Release. Refocus. Do this 3-4 times per session, two or three times a week. You're building a neural pathway so that when it happens in a real game, the response is already wired.

Practice reps. Talk to your goalie coach or your team's coaching staff. Ask them to deliberately create scenarios in practice where you're expected to let in a goal — a 2-on-0, a penalty shot sequence, a rapid-fire drill where the point is volume, not perfection. After each goal, run the reset. Make it muscle memory.

Post-game journaling. After every game, write down one or two goals you want to let go of and one thing you did well on the very next shot after those goals. This shifts your self-evaluation from outcome-based (how many goals did I let in) to process-based (how did I respond). Over the course of a season, that journal becomes the most powerful evidence you have that you can handle adversity — because you can look back and see yourself doing it.

A Note for the Parents

If you're reading this as a hockey parent — and I know a lot of you are — here's what I need you to hear.

The car ride home is not the time to coach. It's not the time to say "you should have had that second goal." Trust me — your goalie already knows. They knew the second it went in. They've already replayed it a hundred times.

What your kid needs from you after a tough game is presence, not analysis. Ask them how they're feeling. Ask them if they want to talk about it. And if they don't? Respect that. The best thing a goalie parent can do is create space for the reset to happen — not pile on with well-meaning feedback that keeps the loop running.

I've worked with enough families to know that the parents who understand this are the ones whose kids stay in the game the longest. Not because they're sheltering them — but because they're letting the goalie own their own mental process. And that ownership is where real confidence comes from.

The Goalies Who Last

In 12 NHL seasons, I watched a lot of goalies come and go. Some of them had better reflexes than me. Some of them had better size. But the ones who stayed — the ones who built long careers and earned their teammates' trust night after night — were the ones who could take a bad goal, a bad period, a bad game, and come back the next shift, the next period, the next game with a clear mind and ready hands.

That's not a talent. It's a skill. And like every skill, it can be trained.

So the next time a soft goal goes in and your brain starts telling you a story about what kind of goalie you are — stop. Breathe. Acknowledge it. Release it. Refocus on the next puck.

The goal happened. It's done. The only thing that matters now is the next save.

Go own it.

Curtis McElhinney is a two-time Stanley Cup Champion (2020, 2021) and the founder of Peak Performance Goaltending in Steamboat Springs, CO. He works with competitive goaltenders on both the technical and mental sides of the position. To learn more about the frameworks discussed in this post, check out The Crease Mindset — available at ppgoaltending.com.