Rating:

Not Rated

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Brad Hammersmith, Sebbin (Heated Rivalry), Victor St. Simon, Ryan Carmichael, Connors (Heated Rivalry), Yuna Hollander, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

POV Outsider, Goalie Shane Hollander, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, accurate hockey, 5+1 Things, POV Multiple, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Player Shane Hollander, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders (Game Changers), Supportive Boston Bears | Boston Raiders (Game Changers), Established Relationship, Secret Relationship, Coming Out, Texting, Humor, Fluff, Idiots in Love, Everybody Kisses The Goalie, The Boston Bears Are Not Detectives

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-08-02 Words: 14,545 Chapters: 1/1

Must Be a Goalie Thing

Summary

Shane Hollander is the most sought-after goalie on the market in the 2015 offseason. The Bears are thrilled when they get the steal of the decade by signing him out from under Montreal. It’s even cooler that their captain is so close with Hollander. The two are like, best friends or platonic soulmates or something.

Alternatively: 5 times the Boston Bears should’ve guessed that Hollander and Rozanov were totally gay for each other + 1 time when everyone knew (Except Carmy).

Notes

There’s lots of very dense hockey terminology in the beginning. For those of you into hockey, enjoy. For those of you not deep into hockey, don’t worry. You don’t need to understand any of it; feel free to treat it like the beginning of a fantasy novel where there’s all those new worldbuilding magic-words stuff that your eyes kinda glaze over.

STRONGLY RECOMMEND enabling Creator's Skins.

• Inspired by good on my own accord by impetuous
• Inspired by Rule 69.3 - Contact Inside the Goal Crease by zero_byte

1. Ryan Carmichael. July 3^rd 2015

Everyone knew that Boston was going to get a new goalie this offseason. Even Ryan knew it, and he was still feeling the lingering effects of the concussion that had ended his season, and his brain sometimes felt a bit like mush. Sullivan had played solid enough, helping them get the Cup the season before, in 2014. But Sully had been thirty-seven at the time, barely clinging to a 0.905, and they’d won despite him rather than because of him. Last year, Sully’s performance fell off a cliff towards the end of the year, his thirty-eight-year-old body finally giving out. And the backup had somehow been even worse. Boston’s offense had been hot as ever, led by Rozanov, but even they couldn’t overcome a pair of goalies averaging less than 0.88.

It had been especially bitter watching their rival Voyagers lose their starting goalie in February, then get a Cup because of backup Shane Hollander’s absolutely fucking insane 0.931 postseason save percentage. The kid had been playing for, like, under $900K on a one-year QO. And he was still an RFA, so rumor had it that Montreal was gonna stick him on another QO to have him as a backup earning less than a mil, since they still had Drapeau at a stupidly-overpriced $6M AAV for another four years. The Voyagers didn’t have a penny of wiggle room under the cap; they’d done the hockey-equivalent of triple-mortgaging the house to make their Cup run last year, and everyone knew it. And yet, somehow they were going to have two starting-caliber goalies while Boston had zero.

Ryan sighed. Some people just had all the luck. Except for Hollander, anyway. Montreal had him over a barrel. He’d only passed the ten-game threshold in the 13-14 season, so he still had two more years until he could even go to arbitration. The kid was probably going to be jerked around until he hit UFA, because there was no chance of Montreal trading him while they had him stuck there so cheaply. Unless something crazy happened, like an offer sheet, but no one had put up an offer sheet in two years, and the last time the player actually switched teams from one was 2007.

So, while getting Hollander would’ve been awesome, someone else would have to bail out the Bears. Goalie was the only glaring weakness on the team, and if they could get someone solidly good, they’d be right back in Cup contention. Rumor was that management was trying hard to get someone now, while they still had three years left on Roz’s contract. Ryan could only imagine how expensive Rozanov was going to be in 2018.

His phone buzzed and Ryan looked back down at the notification. The chat was for those Bears players like Ryan, who obsessively followed free agency. It was uncreatively named “Bears Goalie 2k15”.

It was July 3^rd, two days after free agency had opened, and they were all waiting to see what Langman, the Bears’ GM, was going to do. Olsson had gone to San Jose yesterday on a five-year $7.4M AAV and the chat had exploded. Rumors were that Langman had been talking to him, but there was no way the Bears could afford that, even if they bought out Sully’s contract.

Ryan didn’t know who else to suggest. It was a bad year for teams buying goalies, not many starting-tier prospects available. He went back to his computer, where he had approximately twenty tabs open about free agency and trade rumors. Ryan clicked to the Twitter tab where he had the #BostonBears sorted by “newest first”. Most of it was junk, but Ryan was fucking bored and didn’t have anything better to do. If any legitimate rumors happened, that’s the tag they would use.

Ten minutes passed with Ryan scrolling aimlessly through various rumor sites. The group chat kept going with the normal bullshit, buzzing against his desk every few seconds. Ryan refreshed Twitter again.

And right there, on the top:

Ryan’s eyes flew up to the handle. Brackett. He was legit, from the Boston Globe. Brackett was in the scrum every Bears game; if anyone had the contacts with management to get this scoop, it’d be him. He’d broken the news when Ryan Price got traded to Boston, and then again when Price got traded away last year.

Montreal would’ve scalped them for this. They didn’t have any wiggle room in the cap, so it was hard to imagine them taking anyone from Boston with a big contract, but maybe they’d gotten Boston to keep the salary on their sheets. That was the downside of trades. It was fun to get an exciting guy, but it sucked losing people from your own locker room.

It was a good point. That was one of the reasons offer sheets happened so rarely. GMs fucking hated having their arms twisted like that, and what goes around comes around, so it was kinda taboo for management. Plus, from the player’s perspective, whatever deal you signed with another team, your own team could just match it and then you were stuck with an organization that you’d just fucked over. It was almost always better, for every party, to just do a trade rather than an offer sheet. If it weren’t for Montreal’s absolutely fucked cap situation, there’s no way this would’ve worked.

~ ~ ~

2. Cliff Marleau. September 16^th 2015

During the week of July 3rd to the 10^th, Cliff had been antsy as fuck. But just like everyone had predicted, Montreal either couldn’t or wouldn’t figure out a way to afford that contract. So now here they were, on Wednesday of training camp, with a brand-new goalie who’d been a fucking wall in practice for the last three days. And for three days, their captain had hovered over Hollander like a guard dog, glaring the life out of anyone who so much as looked at the guy.

Cliff honestly didn’t know why Rozanov was so worried. Hollander was chill. Yeah, he’d flat out denied their invitations to go drinking after practice, saying unironically that he needed to be in bed by nine-thirty pm and in full REM by ten. And he had refused point blank to touch the pizza Connors brought in, eating some weird rabbit food instead. Rozanov was right that Hollander was shy as fuck, and didn’t really make eye contact, but, like, whatever? That all wasn’t even in the top ten weirdest goalie behavior Cliff had experienced.

Their backup last year, Matthews, had kept an actual Chucky doll in his stall. Like, the murder doll from the movies. Whenever someone on the team fucked up in a way that led to a goal-allowed, Matthews would go stare at the guy while whispering into Chucky’s ear. Back in the AHL, Cliff’s starting goalie scratched his nails on a chalkboard exactly seven times before each game. In juniors, Martin (number 22) had to lay out all his goalie pads in perfect angles, in the middle of the locker room, for exactly twenty-two minutes pregame. One time their winger Francis tripped over them and ruined the angle. Martin had jerked off into Francis’s helmet that night after the game. When Francis punched Martin for that, Francis had been the one booted from the team. Martin barely got scolded, and no one had left their helmet in the locker room for the rest of the season.

So yeah, Hollander was weird. But he was weird in a minds-his-own-business kind of way. And he was genuinely nice and polite, like some sort of model Canadian. Cliff watched him accidentally bump into a chair yesterday and then apologize to it. He was cute and harmless, like a baby or a puppy.

Which was exactly why Cliff figured somebody ought to actually welcome the kid, instead of standing around admiring him like he was a painting.

Rozanov had gone off to do captain shit with the coaches after skate, which meant the guard dog was off duty for the first time in three days. Hollander was at his stall with his shirt off and his hair still soaked, working a roll of tape, tongue just slightly poking out between his teeth. Every wrap was laid down flat and even, no thumb prints. Cliff had watched guys tape a stick for years and he'd never once seen it done this neatly.

"Hey. Hollander."

Hollander's head came up about forty percent of the way. "Hey. Um. Marleau, right?"

"Marly's fine." Cliff sat down two stalls over, which he thought was pretty considerate of him, giving the kid space. "Wanted to say, good three days. That thing in the shootout drill where you came out and just stood there? Sebby's still mad about it."

That got him something. It wasn’t a smile, exactly, more like the beginnings of one. "He telegraphs. He drops his shoulder before he goes backhand."

“Oh shit don’t tell him yet. I want to torture him for the next month with how he can never get a backhand past you.”

“Too late, I already chirped him about it.”

Cliff laughed, and Hollander did the almost-smile again, down at the tape, and Cliff thought: okay, there he is. He was going to be fine. He just needed somebody to crack the seal on him. So Cliff stood up, and did what he had done to roughly nine hundred teammates in his career, which was to reach over and put a hand on the kid's bare shoulder.

Hollander went stiff as a board.

It wasn't a flinch. Cliff had seen flinches. This was a full lockup, every muscle in the kid's back seizing at once, shoulder rolling forward and under Cliff's palm to get out from beneath it, chin tucking, eyes going somewhere around Cliff's knees. It lasted maybe a second. Then Hollander said, very politely, "Sorry— sorry, I'm. That's my fault," to a spot on the carpet.

Cliff took his hand back like the kid’s shoulder was on fire.

"No, bud, that's on me." His ears were hot. "Should've asked."

"It's not—" Hollander pressed his mouth flat. "I was just surprised. I overreacted."

"Yeah. No. Course," Cliff babbled helplessly. “No problem bro.”

Honestly, Cliff should’ve known better. Goalies and touch was a whole thing. Rousseau in Providence wouldn't let a trainer touch his mask, not even to move it eight inches on a shelf. On game days, Matthews-with-the-Chucky-doll required a personal bubble of five feet, non-negotiable. Usually, outside of game days, goalies were actually more touchy than other players, at least with their teammates. But every goalie had weird things about them, and Cliff should not have assumed. Even three days into knowing the guy, Cliff could tell that Hollander was extremely particular about his body and his routine, so it made sense that personal space was one of his things.

He was trying to figure out how to apologize when Rozanov came out of the showers.

Roz had a towel around his neck and nothing else on but shorts, doing that thing he did where he became the focal point of the entire room. Then he crossed the carpet without breaking stride and dropped his whole arm across Hollander's bare shoulders.

Cliff felt like watching a slow-moving trainwreck. He jerked forward helplessly, with no idea of what he’d actually do. God, this was a disaster.

Except it wasn’t. All that locked-up tension in Hollander's back went out of him at once, shoulders coming down. He looked over at Rozanov with a fond smile, and he wrapped his own arm around Roz’s waist. If Cliff hadn’t seen this kid clam up from a touch on the shoulder literally thirty second ago, he would think Hollander was one of those overly cuddly goalies. He looked perfectly comfortable pressed hip-to-shoulder against Rozanov.

"You are still doing tape," Rozanov said, disgusted. "Is one stick."

“I tape three sticks in case one breaks. I told you that already.”

Rozanov stared down at Hollander, eyes wide and mouth slightly opened.

“I thought that was joke! Three sticks! In case one breaks? Obviously joke!”

Hollander rolled his eyes. “You actually thought I would joke about that?”

“I don’t know, Hollander. You have sneaky-funny sense of humor, sometimes” Rozanov shook him a little and Hollander swayed with it, unbothered. “Okay. Yes, in hindsight it is you, so I should have known it was not joke.”

Cliff felt his own shoulders come down about an inch.

World Juniors. Right. Roz had said it in the chat and Cliff had scrolled past it without thinking about what it meant. These two had known each other since they were teenagers. Roz had said we go way back and then spent three days standing over this kid like a Rottweiler in a Bears hat, and here was Hollander, who couldn't take a hand on the shoulder, going boneless the second Rozanov got hold of him.

They were actually friends. Real ones. From before. Which, honestly, explained the whole week.

"Marly." Rozanov had noticed him. He hadn't moved his hand. "You are bothering my goalie."

"He’s our goalie, Roz."

"No." Rozanov looked at Hollander with an expression Cliff could only describe as smug. "Is my goalie." His thumb moved once, absently. "Only mine."

"Ilya," Hollander said, to the floor.

"Is true. Six years I am the only one who touch him—"

"Ilya! Don’t you fucking dare—"

"Who touch him without making him uncomfortable. He is shy," Rozanov explained to Cliff, delighted.

Hollander's face was fully red now, and he'd put both hands over it. Rozanov was laughing that huge, stupid laugh of his and rocking Hollander back and forth. Down the room, St-Simon looked over, saw the captain manhandling the new goalie, grinned, and went back to his phone.

Cliff felt something warm and dumb happen in his chest.

He'd been on tons of teams. He knew what it looked like when a room was going to work and when it wasn't. Mostly you couldn't tell in September, but sometimes you could. Sometimes a guy walked in, and the shape of the year changed. Their captain — who Cliff loved but who was, on a personal level, an absolute menace — had spent the summer apparently orchestrating an offer sheet through channels the League's lawyers were probably still investigating. Then he’d attached himself to this weirdly polite twenty-four-year-old like a barnacle, and now their shy goalie was hiding his face and laughing.

Their captain took care of his people. That was the thing about Roz that the media never got.

Once they were dressed, Rozanov got Hollander's bag off the hook one-handed, slung it over his own shoulder along with his own, and steered the kid toward the door. He was chatting the whole time, something about dinner and about how three sticks was a symptom something called “terminal boring”. Hollander went where he was pushed. He was arguing about the sticks. Their voices went down the tunnel together and got quiet.

Sebbin was staring at them as they left, head cocked to the side. Cliff squinted at the guy, ready to fucking tackle him if he made a move. Cliff waited until the door shut. Then he stood up and put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and the room looked at him.

"Nobody touches Hollander," he said to everyone, but mostly to Sebbin.

"What?" Sebbin said.

"Goalie thing. He spooks like a kicked dog if you touch him unexpectedly. So nobody grabs him, nobody hugs him, and Sebby — I swear to fucking God. I know you think it’s fuckin’ hilarious to smack everyone’s ass, but Hollander is off limits. You hear me?”

Sebbin was still looking at the door where Hollander and Rozanov had left, brow furrowed.

“Yeah, nah. Pretty sure if I did that to Hollzy, Roz would rip my head off,” Sebbin said.

“Damned straight,” Connors said. “No wonder Roz has been hovering so much. Didn’t he grow up with Vetrov’s daughter? I heard that Vetrov sic’d the Russian mafia on a dude who ripped a seam on his pads. I bet he trained Roz in, like, the secret goalie code of honor.”

Everyone nodded at that. Vetrov was a fucking legend for his unbelievable career as Boston’s star goalie in the nineties. And he was also notorious for being a nightmare to work with; everyone who’d ever played with him had an absolutely unhinged goalie-story about him.

"So it's a rule," Hammersmith said, from behind his phone. "Fine. Except Rozanov's had his hands on Hollander every second of every day since Monday."

The room went quiet for a second while everybody thought about it.

"Well, yeah," Cliff said. "They've known each other since they were kids."

“Only since they were seventeen,” Sebbin said ponderously.

“Yeah, and seventeen is a kid, genius.”

“They’re still goddamned kids,” grumbled Hammersmith, who was thirty-three and bitter about it. But he seemed to accept the point, just nodding and looking back down at his phone.

~ ~ ~

3. Danny Whitford. November 3^rd 2015

Danny had three games left.

He’d played six games, and he could play nine without it counting towards his ELC. If he played nine and went back to Providence, then his ELC would slide and the team would definitely keep him. But once he hit ten games, the clock started, and Langman had to decide whether Danny was good enough to start a clock over. He needed to make a case about being worth the clock starting. Except, in his six games in the NHL, Danny had exactly one blocked shot to show for it.

So he'd developed a system. The system was: get there first, leave last, say nothing, and write everything down.

The writing-down part lived in his phone, in a note called “BOS. RULES”, which he would have burned his own hands off before letting anyone see.

Rule 3 had been the first one. Marleau had delivered it to him personally, on day one, with a hand on Danny's shoulder. That was also something Danny had noticed; this team was weirdly touchy-feely. Marleau put his hand on someone’s shoulder at least thirty times a day. Rozanov would hip-check you as he walked by. Hammersmith ruffled Danny’s hair twice yesterday, which honestly had been kinda nice. Sebby slapped Danny’s ass after the second time, which had been much less nice. Bro-hugs and dap-ups were exchanged like cigarettes in a prison block. It was pretty cool, really, except for Sebbin. Danny liked it.

But that made it painfully obvious that no one touched the goalie. Hollander got a two-foot bubble that the whole team treated like one of the Ten fucking Commandments.

~ ~ ~

Danny got to the rink at 7:20 AM on Wednesday, which was twenty minutes earlier than he needed to and about an hour and a half earlier than anyone reasonable, and the black Ferrari was already in the lot.

It was always already in the lot.

He'd noticed it his first day and then couldn't un-notice it. Rozanov drove. Hollander got out of the passenger side. Every single day, home games and practice days and the morning they flew to Buffalo, there was one car and two guys, Rozanov with a coffee and Hollander with some horrible green thing in a shaker bottle. They always came out of the car mid-conversation as though to make it indisputable that they’d driven together and hadn’t just met up at the rink.

Today they were arguing.

Danny sat in his own car, which he was not going to get out of first, because getting out first meant walking in with them. Walking in with them meant talking, and guys like Danny did not bother guys like Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. That one was so obvious that it didn’t need to go in the Notes app. So he sat there and watched.

Rozanov got out and said something over the roof of the car. Hollander said something back without looking up, hauling two bags out of the back seat: his own and, Danny was pretty sure, Rozanov's, because Rozanov had walked away from the vehicle carrying nothing but a coffee. Rozanov turned around and said something else. Hollander said, loud enough to carry across forty feet of asphalt, "—because you never run it, Ilya, it's not a storage unit—"

Rozanov threw his head back and laughed.

Then he came back, took the second bag off Hollander's shoulder, and shoved him lightly toward the doors with a hand between his shoulder blades. Hollander went, still talking, and they disappeared inside.

Danny didn’t write anything down about it.

~ ~ ~

He asked four days later, and only because Connors asked him something first.

"You got a place yet, Whitty?"

"Corporate housing. Over by the— the one with the CVS."

"Yeah, that's where they put everybody. It's fine. Get a real one if you stick."

If you stick. Danny's stomach lurched like he was going to vomit. To distract himself, he said the first thing available, which was, "Do Rozanov and Hollander live in the same building?"

Danny was not prepared for what happened next, which was that four different men gave him four different answers, and none of them appeared to notice.

"They live together," Sebbin replied.

"You’re so fucking stupid Sebby. Everyone knows that Hollander doesn't drive in Boston," Carmichael said, from the bike. "It's a superstition thing. He had a whole thing about it, I don't know."

"It's not a superstition, Boston streets are a nightmare," Marleau said. "Guy's from Montreal. You ever driven in Montreal? It's the opposite. Everything's backwards there."

"It's not Boston." Hammersmith didn't look up from his phone. "His junior team's bus went off the road outside Sudbury in… 2010, I think it was 2010. Nobody was hurt. He doesn't drive on game days."

"But it’s not a game day?" Carmichael said.

Hammersmith considered this for approximately one second. "Right. So it's even worse than I said."

"Roz just takes care of him," St-Simon said, shrugging. "That's a captain thing. Bergie used to pick up Kowalik."

"That's what I said," whined Sebbin.

"You said they live together, dumbass."

"Yeah?"

“How would that even work?” Carmichael laughed. “Hollander needs his beauty sleep, and Roz would sexile him seven nights a week!”

“Can you even imagine? Sebby, we really need to get you checked for concussions again.”

And then Marleau said something about the flight time to Ottawa and the entire conversation was gone, evaporated, replaced. Danny stood there holding a resistance band with the distinct sensation of having watched something happen that he couldn't name.

He wrote it down in the car.

~ ~ ~

Danny finally understood it on a random Tuesday.

Rozanov got dragged into media, a long one. Some Russian outlet had flown a guy in, so the PR staff put him in the back room with the good backdrop and shut the door. Danny was in the lounge, doing a bunch of unnecessary stretches because he'd found that if he stayed at the rink long enough somebody usually talked to him.

Hollander was on the couch with a book. An actual book, paper. Danny squinted at the cover and read something about Soviet hockey in the mid-twentieth century. Jesus.

Carmichael came through with his keys already out. "Hollzy. You want a ride? I'm heading out."

"I'm okay. Thanks though."

"You sure? He's gonna be in there a while."

"Yeah, no, I'm good."

"Suit yourself." Carmichael made a face at Danny on the way out that Danny interpreted as goalies, what can you do. Danny made a face back that he hoped read as ha, yes, goalies, and then Carmichael was gone and it was just the two of them.

Rozanov was in there for an hour and forty minutes.

Hollander read for all of it. He didn't check his phone. He didn't pace or sigh or do any of the things Danny would have done. At some point Danny stopped stretching entirely and just sat there being quietly astonished, because he had never in his life seen a professional athlete be still for ninety consecutive minutes. Shit. Maybe that’s how you get a save percentage of 0.928, by like, becoming in harmony with your surroundings or something.

When the door finally opened, Rozanov came out talking before he was fully through it. "—twenty minutes about my father, Shane, twenty minutes!" Hollander shut the book and stood up in one motion, and his whole aura changed. Danny couldn't have described how. Something in the shoulders.

"Was it bad?"

"Was boring. Is worse." Rozanov took the book out of his hand, looked at the page he'd stopped on, made a noise of profound contempt, and gave it back. "You did not go with Carmichael."

"No."

"Good boy," Rozanov said.

Danny, who was nineteen years old and had been in the National Hockey League for twenty-nine days, understood exactly what he was seeing. One of the great captains of his generation was doing the small, unglamorous work of team building that nobody wrote about. Danny felt so lucky to be in the room that his ears went hot.

He waited until they left. Then he added:

~ ~ ~

His dad flew in for game nine.

Danny found him in the family lot afterward trying to be cool, standing next to the rental car with his hands in his pockets, pretending he hadn’t been standing there for forty minutes. They'd won. Danny had played eleven minutes and hit somebody, once, memorably, and his dad had already brought it up twice.

They were still standing there when the Ferrari went past.

The windows were rolled down, because Rozanov drove with the windows down in November like a lunatic. Rozanov's arm was hanging out. Hollander sat in the passenger seat with his head tipped back against the rest and his eyes closed. As they came level Rozanov said something and reached over without looking and put his hand on the back of Hollander's neck. Hollander smiled without opening his eyes. Then they were around the corner and gone.

Danny's dad watched the whole thing.

"That's the Russian kid. Rozanov."

"Yeah."

"He seems close with your goalie."

"Oh. Yeah, no, they go way back, Juniors and stuff." Danny heard himself say it in the voice the older guys used, flat and certain and a little bored. Something in his chest expanded to about twice its normal size; he felt like one of the guys, like he belonged. "Hollzy doesn't drive here. Bus thing when he was in Juniors. So Roz just takes him everywhere, it's not a big deal, he's like that with everybody."

"Huh," his dad said.

He looked down the road for another second. Then he said, "Well. Good group," and Danny said "yeah, it's a really good group," and they got in the rental car and went to get food.

He didn't find out until Thursday that he was staying.

~ ~ ~

4. Victor St-Simon. December 28th 2015

Victor had been Ilya Rozanov's teammate for four seasons, which meant he knew that Rozanov stayed in Boston for the Christmas break.

Russians didn't do Christmas. That was the official explanation. It had been delivered once, in Victor's first year, in a tone that closed the subject. Their Christmas was in January, and it wasn't a big deal anyway, and Moscow was nine time zones and eleven hours of flying for seventy-two hours off. Perfectly reasonable. Everyone shrugged, said “that sucks, man,” and told him not to get too wasted at all the parties he was going to.

So Rozanov stayed. And every year he came back from the break looking like something the cat dragged in.

It wasn’t a hangover, or not just a hangover. Victor had seen hungover; hungover was Carmichael in October, green and cheerful and useless for exactly one skate. This was different. Rozanov would come in on the twenty-seventh with bags under the eyes and a tense jaw, and he'd be mean. It wasn’t the fun kind, not the kind where he told Hammersmith his slapshot was like a little girl’s. The other kind. He ran Marleau into the boards during a no-contact drill in 2013 and didn't apologize. He put a puck off the back of a rookie's helmet in 2014, and when the coach asked, said that the rookie had been looking too happy.

Then around the fourth of January he'd be fine again, and nobody ever said anything, because he'd put up eighteen points in December and you don't ask the leading scorer in the National Hockey League why he's an asshole sometimes.

Victor had asked once. Sort of. His second year he'd mentioned that Marianne always made too much food and there was a place at the table on the twenty-fifth. Rozanov had smiled and said yes, absolutely, thank you, what should I bring… and then hadn't come. Hadn't texted. He turned up at the rink on the twenty-seventh hungover and mean and didn't mention it. Victor, who was twenty-seven now and had learned a few things, understood he'd been told no in the politest way Rozanov knew.

He never asked again.

~ ~ ~

Which was why, on the twenty-eighth of December, Victor was standing in the middle of the room, wondering if he needed to get checked for a concussion.

Rozanov was glowing.

He'd come in ten minutes early. He'd brought a tin — an actual tin, red, with a snowman on it — and put it on the table in the lounge and announced that everyone should eat it. When Connors asked what it was, Rozanov said he didn't know and had eaten nine of them anyway. He looked rested. He had color in his face. At some point in the previous four days he had acquired a scarf, which he was wearing indoors, and which Victor was fairly sure was not his, because it was about two feet too short for him.

"Roz." Marleau had his mouth full. "What the fuck happened to you?"

"What?"

"You look—" Marleau gestured at all of him. "Happy."

"I am always happy. I am delight."

"You're a nightmare and you know it. Where were you?"

"Ottawa."

There was a pause while approximately thirteen men tried to think of one single thing in Ottawa.

"...Ottawa," Carmichael said.

"Is where Shane's parents live."

Victor exchanged a glance with Marleau, not sure what to do with that.

"You spent Christmas," Marleau said slowly, "at Hollzy's parents' house."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Rozanov looked at him with an expression of enormous patience. "Because they invite me, Marly. Is how it works. Someone say come to my house, and then you go to the house."

"You have a picture?" Sebbin said. "Roz. Roz. You got a picture?"

Rozanov had a picture. Rozanov had, it became immediately clear, been waiting all morning for somebody to ask him for the picture. He unlocked his phone, turned it around, and the room came apart.

Ilya Rozanov — six-two, two-fifteen pounds, the most feared man in the Eastern Conference — was standing in front of a Christmas tree in matching flannel pajamas. Red ones. There were reindeer on them. Four people were in the shot: Hollzy’s parents, who’d come to both of Boston’s away games in Montreal and Ottawa, as well as Hollzy and Roz. Rozanov stood in the middle, wearing a look Victor had never once seen on him.

"Oh my God," said Carmichael.

"You guys are so fucking cute," said Marleau. "Roz. I’m gonna throw up."

Behind them on the mantel were four stockings. Three of them matched. The fourth was a slightly different red, the felt still stiff and bright, and the name across the top had been stitched by somebody who'd started her letters too big and had to crowd the last one in at the end.

I-L-Y-A.

"Aww." Carmichael's voice went an octave higher than normal. "Aww, they made you a stocking."

"Yuna make it." Rozanov said this with tremendous, unbearable pride, like he was talking about his Stanley Cup ring or something. "Two weeks she make it. Is not very good. She says next year she does better one."

"Who's Yuna?" Connors said.

"Is Shane's mother." Rozanov said incredulously, as though Connors had asked who the Pope was.

"That's actually so nice, though." Marleau had gone soft around the edges. "They just… take you in? Like that?"

“These are the most Canadian Canadians to ever Canadian,” Victor said. “I can see where Hollander gets it from.”

"Poor little orphan boy," Sebbin said, wiping away an imaginary tear. "All alone at Christmas. Rescued by kindly Canadians."

"Fuck you, Sebby."

"No, no, it's beautiful. I'm emotional."

"Hope you behaved yourself, though." Carmichael was grinning. Rozanov's reputation preceded him, and it was well-earned. There had been a thing in an LA nightclub in 2013 that the PR staff still didn't like discussed. "Big Russian bachelor. Nice family home. Hope you didn't have any guests up in that guest room, if you know what I'm—"

"We all know what you mean, Carmy. It wasn't subtle."

“But c’mon, bro? Please tell me you didn’t fuck any girls in the Hollanders’ guest room,” Carmichael said, in a tone of voice that implied he really hoped that Rozanov had.

Rozanov didn't answer right away.

He was looking across the room. Victor followed the look and found Hollander looking back. He’d apparently been sitting in his stall the entire time with a roll of tape and had not made one single sound.

"No," Rozanov said. "I did not fuck any girls at Hollander house."

He said it with a tone that suggested it was a joke, but Victor didn’t understand the punchline. Nor did anyone else, apparently, except— Hollander. Rozanov was staring right at Hollander, whose face was scarlet. Ah, apparently an inside joke then. Hollander said something short and vicious in French, which was what he did when he wanted to talk shit without consequences. Then he stormed out, headed for the ice.

"What'd he say?" Connors demanded. Victor was only half-decent in French, to his grandmother’s eternal displeasure, but nobody else on the team spoke a word. For the last three months and change, he’d been the team's official translator of Shane Hollander's swearing.

“Something about ‘walk in’, and ‘jizz stain’. I think he was calling Roz a walking cum stain.”

The room absolutely roared.

~ ~ ~

Victor thought about it that night. Four years. After four Decembers of watching that man walk in on the twenty-seventh looking like a car accident, all it had taken was Hollander just asking him, and he’d said yes.

Victor didn't feel bad about it. Maybe he could’ve thrown himself a pity party about Roz accepting a seat at someone else’s table and not his. But it didn’t take. What he actually felt was a sort of grudging professional respect, the kind you feel when your opponent scores a beautiful goal.

Because Victor had asked wrong. He’d tried to be casual about it, but in hindsight Victor could see how it had come off. He’d basically been throwing Rozanov a pity invite, in front of the whole locker room, at the last minute. Victor wasn’t sure the best way to go about it, even now, but it didn’t matter. Hollander must have found some other way in. God knew how. The kid apologized to furniture.

Good on you, Victor thought, with real warmth.

~ ~ ~

Whatever happened over Christmas had been good for Hollander, too, because he spent January absolutely bullying the National Hockey League.

The Bears went 10-1-1, in no small part due to Hollander’s unreal 0.941 percentage over that span. He put up three shutouts in five starts; during second intermission of the third one, Whitford had said “shut uh—” and Marleau had tackled him into a laundry cart. Turns out he’d just been telling Sebbin to “shut up” about something, which — fair. But yeah, the team was becoming rabid about the goalie-superstitions. Now they were only allowed to say “be quiet” or “fuck off” on game days, to avoid any other near misses. By the twentieth the national broadcasts had started running the Vezina graphic, which had three headshots on it, and one of them was a twenty-four-year-old in a Bears sweater who said thank you to the guy who filled the water bottles.

And the room changed around him. Victor watched it happen even though he couldn’t say when it started. Guys began blocking shots they had no business blocking. Hammersmith, thirty-three years old with two bad knees and a pension to get to, threw himself in front of a one-timer in Nashville. He laid on the ice for a full thirty seconds, then got up and skated to the bench like nothing had happened. Marleau started fighting people over crease bumps that didn't warrant it. There developed an unlegislated, unspoken understanding that if you were the reason Shane Hollander got scored on, you would be hearing about it on the bench, in the room, on the plane, and possibly in July.

He was theirs. That was the thing. They'd stolen him out from under Montreal in broad daylight and now he was the best goalie on earth, and the entire organization had gone slightly feral about it.

All of that was probably what made the kissing get out of hand.

~ ~ ~

Postgame goalie hugs were an exception to the no-touching rule. Hollander had explained this back in September, something about how a tradition wasn't the same because traditions were structured, and structures were fine, because it was the unpredictability that was the actual— Victor had stopped listening somewhere in the second sentence. He was not paid enough to decipher goalie-logic. The point was that everyone gave Hollander two pats and a head bonk at the end of every game and Hollander was fine with it.

Rozanov went last. Rozanov had gone last since game one in October. In true Rozanov shit-stirrer fashion, Roz couldn’t content himself with two pats and a head bonk. Instead, after every game he would lift the mask off Hollander's head, hold it in one hand, and kiss him on the cheek.

It was a Russian thing. Roz kissed everybody. He'd kissed the Cup in '14 with his eyes shut and his whole face screwed up. He kissed his (girl?)friend Svetlana on both cheeks in the family room in front of God and the Boston Globe. He'd kissed Hammersmith on the forehead in Ottawa once and Hammersmith had been furious about it for three days. It was European. Half the Swedes did it. It didn't mean anything, and you'd have to be a real specific kind of idiot to make it mean something.

So of course the entire team started doing it.

Now everybody kissed the goalie, though the rest of them at least left Hollzy’s mask on when they kissed him. Carmichael did it with an enormous wet smack. Sebbin did it while making a fart noise, for some reason. Maybe he was actually farting; no one had wanted to investigate too closely. Marleau took Hollzy's head in both hands and kissed the forehead of his mask with tremendous solemnity, like a bishop. Recently, Marleau had started murmuring “in Latin”, except that Marleau didn't know any Latin, so it was mostly just gibberish. It was, Victor thought, the single dumbest thing he had ever been part of, and he had once been on a team that adopted a live lobster.

Hollzy hated it. Hollzy went red and swore at them in French, and the team found this so delightful that there was no chance whatsoever of it stopping.

~ ~ ~

It was Sebbin who tried to make it weird, obviously. It was always going to be Sebbin.

"How come Roz is the only one who takes the mask off?"

"What?"

"The kiss thing. We all do the mask, right? He takes it off first. Every time. Like, every single time, since October."

Nobody said anything for a second. There was a sort of tenseness to the silence. Victor couldn’t say exactly why, but he felt angry. It was almost like another superstition, like not saying “shutout” during the game. The thing with Hollander felt fragile; it had felt that way since the very beginning, since their miracle signing, like it was too good to be true. They were honest-to-God favorites to win the Cup, when last year they’d made an early first-round exit, and it was all because their goalie went from a liability to a strength. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and you fucking do not question your goalie’s objectively weird rituals when the guy puts up a 0.941 over a thirteen-game stretch.

Then Hammersmith said, "Because he's doing it properly, you absolute donut," and the room came back on like a light switch.

"Yeah, it's— you can't do it through fiberglass, that's the whole—"

"It's disrespectful in Russia. You gotta see the guy's face."

"It's not Russian, it's Orthodox. It's a church thing."

"Hammy, you're Lutheran."

"My point is it's religious, so it's more serious, so obviously he takes the mask off. That's my point."

Sebby made a helpless gesture. "I'm just saying it's a bit weird that—"

"Well, don't," Carmichael said.

He said it with actual heat. Victor looked over, surprised. Carmichael looked a little surprised at himself, too.

"I just mean it's a nice thing," Carmichael said, quieter. "It's ours. Don't make it weird."

Sebbin looked at him for a second longer than he needed to. Then he shrugged and went back to his phone, and that was that.

~ ~ ~

Somebody in the building started cutting the goalie hug into the postgame package, and by the end of January it was a bit. NESN ran a montage. Then a national outlet ran the montage. Then a morning show in Toronto ran it under a caption that said BEST TEAMMATES IN HOCKEY?, and Victor's mother-in-law texted him about it twice.

In Detroit, a guy from one of the wire services caught Hollander at his stall and asked him, pleasantly, whether the kissing thing ever got old.

Hollander said, "Uh."

Victor was two stalls down with a towel around his neck, and he didn't so much make a decision as find himself already talking. "It's a Russian thing," he said. "It's cultural. You want to ask Roz, he loves talking about it."

"I did ask Rozanov."

"And?"

The reporter checked his notebook. "He said, quote, 'Is because he is my favorite’."

"There you go," Victor said. "Cultural."

~ ~ ~

On February second in Philadelphia, midway through the second, a winger named Doyle came through the crease a half-second late and put a shoulder into Hollander's mask.

So there was a scrum, obviously. You don't put a shoulder into a goalie's head. That isn't a rule so much as a fact about the world, like gravity. Marleau got there first and took two fistfuls of Doyle's sweater. Two Detroit guys arrived to take two fistfuls of Marleau. Hammersmith attached himself to somebody's elbow wearily, almost pro forma, like this was an annoying part of his job that he’d like to be done with. Victor got a d-man's glove in his face and held on to a wrist he never did identify. It was almost like an orchestrated dance.

Hollander got up fine and brushed himself off, so nobody dropped a glove. Nobody was going to. It was February, everyone was tired, Doyle was getting two for it, and that was that.

The linesmen came in and started peeling it apart, and it went pretty easily. Hollander had already turned around to go scrape at his crease. Marleau had let go and was skating a slow circle with his hands out, doing the what, me song and dance for the benefit of the officials. It was over. Two minutes, a power play, then they’d finish the game and go home.

And Doyle, being walked backward by a linesman with his stick under his arm, said, perfectly cheerfully:

"Relax, Hollander, your boyfriend'll kiss it better."

It was standard-issue garbage. Victor had heard some version of it a thousand times. It wasn’t worth anything, especially after the whistle. Victor would’ve just rolled his eyes, except for the fact that Rozanov had heard it. Roz was… unpredictable. Sometimes he laughed delightedly at the nastiest chirps, the ones that were way below the belt. Other times he dropped gloves at the slightest provocation.

Since this was Hollander they were talking about, Victor assumed it would be the latter. Victor, who was the closest Bear to their captain, got a fistful of his jersey. Roz looked pissed, genuinely furious, so Victor put his other hand on Rozanov’s shoulder, too.

“C’mon, Cap. We’ll get our revenge on the power play.”

Rozanov sucked in a deep, aggrieved breath through his nose, let it out slowly through his lips, and then nodded once, sharply. Victor let out a breath of his own, thinking that they’d actually get through this without a suspension.

Apparently Sebbin didn’t get the memo.

He didn't see the start of it. Nobody did. What Victor saw, over Rozanov's shoulder, was Sebbin coming back, around a linesman. Then he apparently went fucking insane because he barreled into Doyle like the guy had broken a stick over Hollander’s back or something. Doyle went down hard. Sebbin was on top of him with his helmet gone somewhere and his right hand doing something the league was going to look at very carefully in the morning.

It took three linesmen. Two of them were bigger than Sebbin. He came off the pile still swinging and still yelling.

"SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH— YOU PIECE OF SHIT— I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU—"

Five for fighting. Two for instigating. Game misconduct. Gone.

He got a standing ovation from the visitors' section on the way down the tunnel, which was about forty people, and he pointed at all of them.

~ ~ ~

Sebbin’s penalty offset Doyle’s, so no power play. They won it 3–1 anyway. Coach said one thing about the lost man advantage, in a flat voice, and then never mentioned it again for the rest of the season.

Things were weird though, between Sebbin, Rozanov, and Hollander. Rozanov kept staring at Sebbin like he was waiting for something. Hollander wouldn’t meet Sebbin’s eyes, which wasn’t too out of character, but Hollzy had gotten a lot better about eye contact throughout the season. And Sebbin kept looking over at them and opening his mouth like he was gonna say something, before turning away instead.

The tension got worse throughout the night. It was weird on the bus to the hotel. It was weird on the way to the airport and waiting at the gate. All the guys were looking at each other and shrugging, because no one knew what the fuck was happening, but nobody wanted to get in the middle of it, either.

Things apparently boiled over, because right before boarding Sebbin marched up and planted himself in front of Rozanov, who shifted halfway in front of Hollander, squared up like he was about to swing a punch. Victor had half a second to wonder whether he should be intervening when Sebbin spoke.

“I don’t fucking care!” he said, like it was bursting out of him. “I truly don’t give a shit. I mean, c’mon guys. You really think it matters? You’re my—” He faltered. When he spoke next it was quieter. “You’re my boys. My Cap. My goalie. Anyone who has shit to say, they say it to me. Yeah?”

For one tense second, Rozanov didn’t say anything. Alarmingly, his eyes seemed a little misty. Then he exploded into motion, and Roz and Sebby were hugging it out like somebody had died or something. Rozanov even pulled Hollander into it. Surprisingly, Hollzy went willingly, hugging Sebbin tightly while Sebbin pounded at his back. Sebbin pulled back, kissed Hollander on the cheek, and didn’t even make a farting sound. He made a move for Rozanov. Roz put his hand on Sebbin’s face and pushed it away, but he was laughing as he did it.

Just like that, the tension was gone, evaporated like it had never been there at all. The three of them were jostling and giggling and chirping at each other, just like usual.

Victor leaned over to Hammersmith. “What the actual fuck just happened?”

“Hell if I know,” Hammersmith replied. “Sebby being Sebby, I guess. And let’s be real, Rozanov is a dramatic little shit.” He was typing something on his phone. Victor glanced over and saw it was a text to his wife, telling her that they were about to board the plane. The antics of the last three hours apparently didn’t even warrant a mention.

Victor made eye contact with Marleau across the room. Marleau just shrugged, looked at where Sebby and Roz were now cheerfully escalating to headlocks, looked back at Victor, and shrugged again. His meaning came through perfectly: I don’t know what the fuck that was, everything’s fine now, it’s February after a road game and I’m beat to hell, you can make a big deal out of it if you want but I’m sure as shit not gonna.

Victor couldn’t agree more.

~ ~ ~

Sebbin got two games.

Boston lost its collective mind. There was a Herald column titled THE BEST TEAMMATE IN THE LEAGUE. There were, by the weekend, T-shirts — real ones, screenprinted, sold outside the Garden — that said SEBBIN DID NOTHING WRONG in Bears gold. A panel show ran ninety seconds on it and ended with a guy in a bad suit saying, more or less rhetorically, does any team in hockey love its goalie more than the Boston Bears?, and the other three panelists agreed that no, no team did, and that it was one of the great stories of the season.

Nobody ever reported what Doyle had said.

Two outlets described it as "a chirp." One said "words were exchanged." The league's own release said an altercation following a stoppage in play, and that was the end of it, because it hadn't been anything. Guys said it every night. Doyle himself, asked about it in Philadelphia, said he didn't remember saying anything in particular and that Sebbin was a good player who skates hard, and that guys get heated sometimes. Everyone accepted this, and the whole thing was over inside of a week.

The story that came out of February second was that the Boston Bears loved their goalie.

Which was true.

~ ~ ~

On the plane, Victor found himself thinking about the stocking.

He wondered how many Christmases Rozanov had spent, quietly miserable and unwilling to accept a hand to get out of it. And then this year, there’d been a felt stocking, brand new, letters crowded at the end, hanging on a mantel in Ottawa in a house where somebody had made room. Victor still didn’t know for sure why Rozanov had turned him down, and he didn’t know why he’d said yes to Hollander. He didn’t know why Sebbin had lost his shit at Doyle, and he didn’t know why it had been a big deal for Roz.

But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t Victor’s business.

Hockey players were in each other’s faces all year long. You were constantly way too fucking close to twenty smelly assholes and sometimes it felt like you didn’t have a single inch to just breathe. Everyone was in everybody else’s business, all the fucking time, so you quickly learned how precious it was to have something for yourself. But at the same time, the guys were your brothers-in-arms; you held each other’s fates in your hands. You fought together night after night, and it sucked to watch a teammate suffer.

Four rows up and across the aisle, Rozanov had his headphones on and his head tipped over onto Hollander's shoulder, asleep or close to it. Hollander was reading, probably something about hockey, knowing him. He turned a page one-handed, because the other hand was somewhere Victor couldn't see.

Victor watched them for a second.

Good, he thought. That's good. Rozanov's got somebody.

Then he put his own headphones on and went to sleep.

~ ~ ~

5. Brad Hammersmith. April 13^th 2016.

Brad turned thirty-four last week. The thing about being thirty-four on a professional hockey team was that you got way too old to deal with the horny, dumbass teenagers and twenty-somethings that you were contractually obliged to deal with. If Brad had to hear one more story about where an overgrown boy-child had stuck his cock, his fucking head would explode. So Brad did everything in his power to ignore locker room chatter, but especially when the subject inevitably turned to sex. He’d gotten good at it, too, thanks to the noise-canceling headphones his wife had gotten him for Christmas. It would take something truly salacious to get his attention, something more interesting than the typical peacocking. Something like—

Something like Rozanov looking like he’d been attacked simultaneously by a bear and a vampire.

The kid’s back was scratched up something fierce, and the hickeys on his neck were so dark that Brad was afraid Rozanov would develop a hematoma. They were clearly sex-related, because Rozanov was strutting around shirtless like he was desperate to show off. He always was. Brad thought there had to be a line in his contract somewhere, like ‘must tell entire locker room every time you fuck’. But, well…

Brad pulled his headphones down around his neck. Sue him. This one actually looked interesting.

"Roz. Roz. Buddy. Put a shirt on."

"I am proud of my body."

"You look like you got in a fight with a lawnmower and lost."

"Blink twice if you need help, man."

"Was she a cat? Did you fuck a cat?"

"Is nice girl," Rozanov said, wounded, applying deodorant with his back to the room. He was probably showing off intentionally, knowing this cocky idiot. "Is very nice girl. You are all jealous."

Standard stuff. Damn. It looked like this was just going to be another boring story about an idiot kid getting his rocks off. Brad reached for his headphones. But then, out of the corner of his eye, Brad saw Carmichael go completely still like a bloodhound catching a scent. His mouth was open, and he’d stopped his conversation with Connors mid-word.

Brad had played with Ryan Carmichael for six seasons and had never once known him to stop talking on purpose.

Carmichael was staring across the room at Hollander, who had just pulled his shirt off, and who had a hickey on his collarbone the approximate size and color of a plum.

"HOLLZY," Carmichael screamed.

Everyone started talking at the same time.

"HOLLZY. HOLLZY. Who—"

"Look at his neck—"

"Did you guys both pull? Did you both pull?"

Hollander froze completely with his shoulders up around his ears, like a dog during a thunderstorm. He always did that when the volume went above a certain threshold, and Brad had learned to feel a little bad for the kid. Twenty-four years old, best goalie on the planet, and he came apart if you said his name too loud.

Hollander getting laid was mildly interesting. Hollander getting laid on the same night as Rozanov brought it up to maybe a four out of ten. Any second now, the kid would stutter something like ‘I guess so’ and then chirp Roz for his battle wounds, and Brad’s headphones would go back on. It was April and everyone was tired, so no one actually cared that much.

Except, instead of that, Hollander said something that brought the interest level up to a six of ten:

"We went to a club together." It fell out of his mouth too fast and a little too loud, kinda like someone had a gun to his head.

Everyone was quiet for a beat. Rozanov looked at Hollander, eyebrows raised high. Sebbin winced like he’d been boarded, for some reason. Everyone else seemed like they were buffering, absorbing this new information. Then it exploded.

"You went to a CLUB?"

"Hollzy went to a club—"

"Hollzy doesn't go to clubs, Hollzy goes to bed at nine thirty—"

"Wait, wait." Marleau held up both hands, pout on his face. "You went to a club. Both of you. And you didn't invite us?"

"Yeah, what the fuck!"

"I'm right here! I'm literally right here every day!"

Rozanov’s hands were up placatingly. He had that cocky smile on his face that meant he was about to say some sort of ludicrous bullshit that would bring all the attention right back onto him.

“Guys, guys,” Roz said. “It’s—”

“It was a goalie thing,” Hollander blurted, with an edge of panic in his voice.

There was a pause.

It was maybe a second long. Brad wouldn't have registered it at all except that his own brain was also churning. Like, goalie-shit explained a lot of weirdness, but what even did that mean? Brad saw his own confusion reflected on the faces of about twenty guys. Everyone was waiting for the rest of it, the part that made it make sense.

"...What?" said St-Simon.

"What's that mean?" said Whitford. "Like— going to a club is a goalie thing?"

"That's not—"

"Is that a superstition? Is that like a—"

Hollander's mouth was open, but nothing was coming out of it. Brad started to wonder if Hollander even knew what the hell he’d been talking about.

Then Rozanov laughed.

"Is okay, Shane." He'd turned around, still shirtless, still hideous but looking extremely fond. "You do not have to be embarrassed. Boys, leave him alone. He does not want to say."

"Say what?"

"He asks me to come." Rozanov spread his hands. "He is shy. With girls, he is very shy, he does not know how to…" Roz made a gesture, as though it encompassed the entire mystique of the feminine half of their species. “So he asks me. I am generous man. I help. He says do not tell the boys, they will make fun. And I say okay, Shane, is our secret."

Brad felt his confusion melt away, because that finally made perfect sense. The kid was a mess socially, everyone knew it. Rozanov had been practically carrying him around like a wallet since September — driving him to the rink, ordering for him at restaurants, physically inserting himself between Hollander and anybody who got too loud. It was the least surprising thing Brad had heard all week. This was normal captain- and friend-behavior, helping the shy kid get laid and then keeping him from getting chirped too hard by the guys in the locker room.

"Aw, Hollzy."

"That's actually so sweet—"

"NO." Carmichael was up off the bench. "No, no, no, we're not doing sweet. Was she hot? Hollzy. Hollzy. Was she hot?"

Hollander made a sound like a kettle.

"She was so fucking hot," Rozanov said.

Brad rolled his eyes. In fifteen years of this, Brad had learned that the details don't mean anything. Guys embellish. It's not even lying, exactly; it's a kind of folk art, and the more specific a man gets, the further you are from anything that happened. The tell is always precision. Nobody who actually got laid last night remembers what color the girl's shoes were.

So when Rozanov started painting his story, Brad let it wash over him.

"Tall. Blonde. Legs like—" Rozanov made a shape in the air that corresponded to no human anatomy. "Best ass you have ever seen in your life. Swear to God, boys, she could be model."

"What was her name?"

Rozanov’s grin went wicked. "Lily," he said gleefully.

"Oh damn! Hollzy likes his girls with flower names," crowed Connors.

Fine. Sure. Lily. Brad had heard four hundred Lilys. He reached for his headphones again.

"Wait," Whitford said, sounding confused. "Hold on. Hollzy, you don't drive. That was number six— I mean. How’d you get your girl home?"

Sebbin’s head came up. "Shit, Whitty, you ever heard of Uber—"

"Ilya drove me," Hollander blurted out.

At least three guys actually hollered. Sebbin’s head dropped down into his hands; his shoulders were shaking.

"Oh my GOD—"

"He drove you—"

"Did you drop them off? Did you drop off Hollzy and his date like a proud fucking dad?"

"That's amazing. That's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Cap, did you wait in the car?"

"No," Rozanov said. He was grinning now, the same grin he wore in the third period of a game they were winning by four, when he'd decided to start doing tricks. "No, we all go back to my place."

Brad took the headphones off his neck entirely and put them in his stall.

"You—"

"All of you—"

"Holy shit." Carmichael had both hands in his hair like a mad scientist. "Holy shit. Roz. Did you sleep with Lily too?"

"No." Rozanov looked genuinely offended. "Is Shane's girl. What kind of man do you think I am?"

"Then who—"

"My girl. Her name is Jane."

"Jane," wheezed Sebbin.

"Jane," Rozanov agreed, smirking wickedly at Sebbin.

And then he was off. Brad, who had promised himself at the beginning of this season that he would no longer participate in this kind of thing at his age, sat and listened to all of it.

"Jesus Christ, boys. Best tits you have ever seen. Huge. Fucking suffocate myself in those tits. And so cute. Freckles, here, and here—" he touched his own cheekbones, "Doe eyes. Little doe eyes. Eleven out of ten. Eleven."

"Okay—"

"And shy. So shy, so quiet, all night she says nothing, I think maybe she does not like me. Then we get to my place, and she is on her knees in the doorway. In the doorway, boys. Before the door is closed." He kissed his fingers, an entirely unnecessary gesture that got exactly the reaction it was designed for. "Biggest freak I have ever met in my life. Hot as fuck. I made her come three times."

"THREE—"

"Three times," said Rozanov, with tremendous dignity.

"It was four," Hollander said thoughtlessly.

Brad’s head snapped to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw everyone else doing the same thing. He would think about this a lot afterward, mostly because of how much he enjoyed it. Hollander had said it flatly, automatically, the exact tone he used when Marleau got a save percentage wrong. He said it and then Brad watched his entire face catch up with his mouth about half a second later. It was, hands down, the single funniest thing Brad had witnessed all season.

"...How do you know?" said St-Simon.

Hollander looked panicked. Even Rozanov seemed nonplussed, for once without a pithy comeback. And Hollander — twenty-four years old, likely Vezina winner, a man who could read a two-on-one before the puck left the blue line — said:

"We, uh. Did it in the same room."

Brad had been present for a lot of loud rooms. He'd won a conference final. He'd been on the ice for Rozanov's overtime goal in '14 that sealed the Cup victory. He had never in his life heard twenty men make a noise like that.

Carmichael left. He physically left the room, walked into the hallway, and came back forty seconds later saying "no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, say it again." Marleau had to sit down. Whitford was going "in the same room? In the SAME ROOM?" on a loop, like a smoke alarm. Hollander was the color of a stop sign and had put his shirt on backwards.

And Rozanov stood in the middle of it with his arms folded, taking absolutely none of the heat, watching Hollander from across the room with an expression Brad had never seen on him before.

"Cap. Cap. Are you gonna see her again? Jane? Are you seeing her again?"

Rozanov didn't answer right away.

"Obviously. Jane is best I have ever had," he said. "If I only fuck her for the rest of my life, I will die happy."

Brad's head came up. Because that? That wasn’t the bit.

He'd been listening to this exact nonsense for his entire adult life, and half of his adolescence. He knew exactly how it was supposed to sound. That last part didn’t fit. It had come out of Rozanov softly, in the wrong cadence. It sounded like something he’d been thinking privately for a while, something that he couldn’t quite keep locked up inside of him, anymore.

"Really?" said Hollander. He'd said it very quietly, into the noise, and it shouldn't have been audible at all. Brad only caught it because he happened to be looking at him.

The smile melted off Rozanov's face. He seemed young, suddenly, tentative instead of cocky. "Maybe," he said. "I think so, yes." The two of them stared into each other’s eyes, and Hollander’s lip quivered.

Then Sebbin made a noise like a dying cat and put his head in his hands. "This is unbelievable," Sebbin said, wheezing. "This is un— I can't—"

"I know, dude. They're fucking dogs. Legends!"

"No." Sebbin was laughing so hard that he was crying. Actual tears, on his actual face. "No, I mean it's literally not believable."

"I know, right??"

"You fucking numbskulls are—" Sebbin flapped a hand at him, gave up entirely, and folded forward until his forehead was resting on his knees. He stayed there for some time.

Somebody threw a roll of tape at Hollander. Somebody started a chant. Brad watched the room lose its collective mind about a foursome that would be team legend by Friday and league legend by the playoffs. But he wasn’t thinking about any of that. He was thinking about the ninety seconds that had actually mattered, at the end, when nobody else had been listening. Because Brad had heard that tone before, exactly once. It had come out of his own mouth, in a bar in Grand Forks in September of 2007, describing a second-year nursing student named Steph to a teammate who hadn't been listening either.

Nine years and two kids ago.

Well, Brad thought. Well, well, well. He felt something he'd have described, if pushed, as fondness. The guys were still going. They'd be going about this until June. Not one of them, Brad thought — not a single one of them — had heard the only interesting thing that happened in this room today.

He picked up his phone.

Then Brad Hammersmith put his headphones back on, closed his eyes, and got about eleven minutes of peace before practice.

~ ~ ~

+1. Cody Sebbin. June 9th 2016.

With a minute-forty left in the third period of Game Five, up 2–1 in the game and 3–1 in the series, Cody stopped watching the puck.

He'd never done that. If you’re watching a hockey game, you watch the puck. But he was hanging over the boards with his chin on his glove, and instead of watching the puck he looked down the bench at his captain.

Rozanov wasn't watching the puck either.

The opponent’s net was empty at the other end, with six guys on offense desperately trying to keep their Stanley Cup hopes alive. And instead of watching the puck, Ilya Rozanov — who was going to go over the boards in about nine seconds and who had scored fifty-one goals that year — was watching Shane Hollander.

Cody wasn’t surprised about it, honestly. He’d spent the whole season watching Rozanov watch Hollander. It’d stopped being interesting around Halloween.

Then the puck came around the wall and Whitford, nineteen years old, who had a Notes app on his phone he thought nobody knew about, chipped it off the glass and out. The clock ran down under a minute, and the puck came back in, and there was a scramble that Cody honestly couldn’t follow. Then Hollander was on his stomach with his glove out in front of him and the puck in it.

The horn blew.

~ ~ ~

Looking back on that moment, Cody wouldn’t remember how he ended up on the ice.

Somehow he’d dropped his stick and hopped the gate, but his first memory would be on the ice, halfway to the net. No one had discussed it and nobody needed to; Hollander made the save that clinched the Stanley Cup as time expired. Of course they were heading for him. Marleau was screaming something next to him with no words in it.

Rozanov got there first, somehow.

Cody saw it: Roz didn't jump on him. Roz got an arm around Hollander's shoulders and turned him, planted his feet, and took the pile on his own back. Twenty grown men in full equipment hit Ilya Rozanov at speed, and Ilya Rozanov absorbed all of it grinning like a lunatic with his goalie tucked under his arm.

It was absolutely fucking insane that Cody was the only one who ever put two and two together.

~ ~ ~

Handshakes were quick. Their captain said something to Roz that made him laugh. Their goalie held onto Hollander's hand about four seconds longer than normal and said something short with his forehead almost touching him, goalie to goalie. Hollander nodded three times fast.

Then the carpet came out, and the table, and the commissioner, and Boston booed him for eleven consecutive seconds. Cody participated. It was one of the great moments of his life.

Conn Smythe went to Hollander, which surprised exactly no one who had watched the postseason. He'd gone 0.943 through four rounds. He'd had two shutouts, in Game One and Game Four, and not one man on that bench had said the word out loud. Whitford had spent the entire third period of Game Four communicating in hand signals like he’d been afraid that saying anything would jinx it.

They gave him a microphone, which was cruel.

"Uh," said the best goaltender on the planet, to a national broadcast. "Thanks. Um. This is a really good group. Everybody blocked a lot of shots this year. So." He paused for a length of time that made the rinkside reporter visibly nervous. "Also thank you to Denny, who does the water bottles. He always keeps mine the right temperature."

Cody screamed. The whole bench screamed. Somewhere behind him Marleau was crying openly into the shoulder of a man who Cody was almost certain worked for the arena.

~ ~ ~

Then came the Cup.

Roz took it off the table and he did not do the thing where you kiss it and pose. He got both hands under it and put it straight up over his head like it weighed nothing, and screamed, and skated four strides with it and screamed again. Cody's face hurt from how hard he was smiling.

Rozanov was a fucking saint and brought the Cup first to the guys who hadn’t been on the team two years ago, the last time they won it.

Whitford, who’d started the year in Providence, was crying openly as he kissed it. God, Cody could only imagine what it’d be like to win the Cup your rookie season. Roz guided it gently to Connors. The Bears vets — Hammersmith, St-Simon, Carmichael, Marleau — hovered around, hugging the newer guys after they finished touching the cup for the first time ever.

Then it came to Cody. He’d been traded to Boston two summers ago, and he’d never been past a Conference Final in his life.

The feeling was indescribable. He’d played an eighty-two-game regular season, followed by four rounds of best-of-seven postseason games. His body was beat to shit. He was already scheduled for surgery on his shoulder in the offseason. Cody didn’t feel any of it. He was floating on a fucking cloud.

Roz clapped his good shoulder and leaned in. “Congrats, Sebby. You earned it.”

Cody fucking loved these guys. He thought he’d love them for the rest of his life.

~ ~ ~

They'd let the families out by then. The ice was crowded with wives in team jackets, kids in sweaters down past their knees, and wet-eyed parents. Somebody's toddler was flat on her back in the crease and completely delighted about it.

And somewhere in there the Cup found its way to Hollander, which was not an accident, because Marleau had been steering it for four solid minutes.

Hollander didn't scream. Of course he didn't. He got his hands under it and lifted it and held it up over his head and just… looked at it, with his mask shoved up on his forehead and his hair stuck flat to his skull. Then he brought it down, and handed it off, and turned around looking for Rozanov.

Rozanov was already there. He reached up and took the mask off Hollander's head.

The building knew what was coming. It was the bit. They’d seen it in the montage, heard about it in all the panel shows, and read the pieces proclaiming the ‘BEST TEAMMATES IN HOCKEY’. Eighteen thousand people made a big, warm, delighted noise, because they'd seen it eighty-two times this season and they had every reason to think they knew what came next.

It didn’t go quite the same way though. Instead, Rozanov put both hands on Shane Hollander's face and kissed him on the mouth.

The noise stuttered.

It didn't stop. That's what Cody would tell people about for the rest of his life, on the record and off it. It staggered for a half-second where the top came off it and it went thin. But then it came back, and it came back bigger, because the city of Boston and the world had just watched their captain kiss the goalie who'd stolen them a Cup, and had, collectively, decided how they felt about it.

~ ~ ~

Cody was moving before he decided to, same as Philadelphia. Two strides in, shoulders already coming up, scanning for the direction the problem was going to come from—

And then he stopped, because there wasn't one.

Huh, he thought. And then he thought some more and remembered what he’d worked out in February. He hadn’t said a word of it out loud to one single human being, because Cody wasn’t stupid, regardless of what the boys thought.

Shane Hollander was going to win the Vezina in three weeks. He'd just won the Conn Smythe. He was barely twenty-five years old and he was under contract for four more years at 4.9M AAV.

Olsson got 7.4M last July, and Olsson had never had a season like this and probably never would in his whole life. Hollander on the open market, today, was worth at least eight-million, probably more to a goalie-hungry team. And Boston had him at four-nine until 2020 because Montreal had been cheap and smug and completely certain that Shane Hollander would do what he was told. Every dollar of that gap was money the Bears got to spend on defensemen for the next four years.

And Rozanov was Rozanov, who’d turned the Bears from a last place bottom feeder into a dynasty that had won two Cups in three seasons. And they had him under contract for two more years on a deal that looked cheap today, because Rozanov was twenty-five and already a guaranteed Hall of Famer. Whatever he signed in 2018 would probably reset the whole damn market. For the next two years — and probably beyond that — all of Boston’s hopes and dreams would come down to Rozanov and Hollander.

So what was anybody going to do? Trade him? Trade which one? Cody tried to imagine the version of Langman who stood at a podium and explained to the city of Boston why their Conn Smythe and Vezina goalie was in Arizona now. He genuinely couldn't get the picture to form. It was even more impossible to imagine it of Rozanov. It didn’t matter what the League thought of it; Hollander and Rozanov were going to win hockey games. They were going to get butts in seats and jerseys flying off the shelves. Because of them, the rich fuckers who owned the team and the stadium and the broadcasting rights were going to get even richer. That’s what really mattered, at the end of the day.

There'd be shit. Cody wasn't dumb about that either. There'd be a columnist somewhere, and some guy in the third row in Long Island with a sign, and an illegal check from somebody who'd regret it. Fine. Cody was extremely comfortable with that whole category of problem. That was the one part of this he was actually qualified for.

He looked around the ice — at Hammersmith holding his youngest kid on his hip, at Marleau with his face in his hands, at the crowd on its feet and not sitting down — and he thought: yeah. They're good. They're gonna be fine.

~ ~ ~

Yuna Hollander walked across the ice in a Bears sweater with her son's number on it, and her husband was behind her in a Bears sweater with ROZANOV on the back. She got to Roz first.

She was maybe five-eight, and Roz was wearing skates still. She had to reach up to get his face, but she got it in both hands and said something to him. Ilya Rozanov — six-two, two-fifteen, the most feared man in the Eastern Conference — folded straight down and put his face in her shoulder and stayed there.

Papa Hollander had Hollzy by both arms and was talking into his ear, fast. Shane was nodding and nodding and not managing any words at all.

Then they swapped. Yuna got her son and made a noise. Hollzy’s dad got hold of Rozanov by the back of the neck and shook him gently and told him something. Roz laughed and wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He didn’t get all the tears but didn't seem to care.

Off to Cody's right, Hammersmith was standing very still, clearly going over all the (frankly blatant) evidence that he’d missed. Cody watched him mouth “Shane” and “Jane” and then smack his forehead with a long groan.

Then he turned to his wife and started chattering, big grin on his face.

~ ~ ~

Cody gave it a minute, then went and did his job.

There was no mask to work around, which threw him for about a half-second. He got a hand on Hollander's shoulder from the front, where he could see it coming. Hollander turned and his expression shuttered a little bit. His shoulders were up, like he wasn’t quite certain what Cody was going to do next.

Cody kissed him on the cheek and made the fart noise.

Hollander's whole face collapsed with relief. He made a sound that was mostly laugh, but had a bit of wetness in it. Rozanov shoved Cody's head sideways with an open hand, and Cody said, "Do we get to keep it overnight or do they take it back? Hollzy. Hollzy. Do they take it back?" and Hollander said, "Why are you like this," in the exact tone he used in September, and that was that, and everything was completely normal.

Sometime later, Carmichael got him by both shoulders.

"Dude. Dude." Carmichael had his hat on backwards and lipstick on his cheek and his face was absolutely streaming. "Did you see Cap?"

"Yeah, Carmy."

"He takes that goalie kiss thing so seriously, man." Carmichael dragged his forearm across his eyes, entirely sincere, radiating a kind of holy simplicity. "Like— damn. You think he’ll kiss Hollzy like that every time we win the Cup?"

“Yeah, Carmy.” He patted Carmichael on the back pityingly. “Yeah, I think he will.”

Eleven months, Cody thought. Eleven months, and these guys think I'm the stupid one.

Across the ice, Yuna Hollander was trying to get all four of them into one photograph and having a hard time of it, because Rozanov kept saying something out of the side of his mouth. Every time he did, her son put his head back and laughed out loud in front of everybody.

Yeah, Cody thought again. They’re gonna be just fine.