Ships in the Night

by Andrew He, Austin Lei, and Edgar Chen

Answer:
COLEMAN

This puzzle is composed of 11 audio clips, each of which is 60 seconds of silence interspersed with “horn” sounds; each clip contains two distinct types of horns. In fact, these horns are all “goal horns” of various NHL hockey teams, as clued in the flavortext by ice, teams, and stick(ing). Each audio clip corresponds to a particular hockey game played by two NHL teams in the 2021-2022 season, with goal horns played when each team scores (note that hockey games last for exactly 60 minutes, hence the 60 second clips). We can identify these games by matching the teams from horns and/or finding games with the right goal count/times.

These games are all relatively high scoring; in fact, each game includes exactly one hat trick by a player (clued by “hold on to your hats”). Indexing into the hat trick scorer using the given values, we get the cluephrase FLAMES’ BLAKE. This refers to the player named Blake on the Calgary Flames in the 2021-2022 season, whose last name is COLEMAN, the final answer.