Chapter 2: The Hat
Shane did not go to the room.
He wanted that on the record, if there were ever a record, which there would not be. He sat on the end of his bed in his own room on the twenty-third floor and held the keycard in its sleeve and looked at it for most of an hour. He brushed his teeth. He did his stretching routine. He texted Hayden back about whether the Vegas buffet was worth it (no) and about whether Hayden's oldest was old enough for skates (yes, obviously, what was he waiting for). He put the card on the nightstand and turned off the light and lay there in the dark with three pillows, thinking about Ilya Rozanov reading a Players' Tribune article twice.
At 12:40 his phone lit up on the nightstand. The contact said Lily, because six years ago Shane had panicked about what to save the number as and that was what had come out, and now it was too late to change it without having to explain why.
Lily: You are not coming.
Shane: Big day tomorrow.
Lily: Tomorrow is skills competition. You are doing accuracy shooting. You could do it asleep. You could do it dead.
Shane: There are cameras everywhere. There's a guy from TSN on my floor.
Lily: There is a guy from TSN on every floor. TSN is a hotel now.
Shane: I'm going to sleep.
A pause, long enough that Shane thought that was the end of it. Then:
Lily: Black coffee. Really.
Shane put the phone face down and pressed his hands over his eyes and did not smile, because there was no one there to see it, which meant it didn't count.
The Boston hat was navy and gold and somebody in the Raiders' equipment room had clearly been told whose head it was for, because it was brand new, stiff-brimmed, and two sizes too big. When the league's social team handed it to him in the tunnel under T-Mobile Arena, he put it on and it settled over his eyebrows like a lid.
"Oh, that's perfect," Priya said. "Don't touch it. Don't fix it. Can you look more upset?"
"I'm not upset."
"Can you look like you're upset?"
"It's a hat, Priya."
The tunnel was crowded with players and handlers and kids from some charity holding signs and a mascot who might have been a knight or a slot machine, Shane couldn't tell. Somewhere ahead the arena was making the noise eighteen thousand people make when they've been promised fireworks. Shane adjusted his gloves and kept his eyes on the floor and did not look for Ilya, which was why he walked straight into him.
"Hollander." Ilya caught him by the elbow. He was in full gear, helmet under his arm, hair damp from warmup and curling at his neck. He looked at the hat for a long, silent second. Then he reached out and, with great ceremony, tugged the brim down another half-inch so it covered Shane's eyes completely.
"I can't see."
"Better. Now you look like real Boston fan. Confused. Sad. Lost on way to Dunkin'."
The coffee people were filming. Of course they were. Shane pushed the brim up and gave Ilya the look he had been giving him across faceoff circles since their first training camp, the one the highlight packages loved, and Ilya gave it right back, delighted.
"You look stupid," Shane said, for the camera.
"I look incredible," Ilya said, for the camera. Then, so quietly it barely moved his mouth: "You wear it very well. I will keep this image for the rest of my life."
Then he was gone, swallowed by a crowd of Pacific Division guys who wanted to give him a hard time about something, and Shane was standing in a tunnel in a hat that didn't fit with his heart going like he'd just done a bag skate.
Accuracy shooting was five targets, the four corners and one dead centre, and Shane had won it twice before. He knew how this went. You let the noise fall away. You found the puck and the target and nothing else. The arena became a hum, like a fridge in another room.
He went third. He took off the hat (the crowd booed, cheerfully, because he was Shane Hollander and booing him was a sport in every building but one) and handed it to a linesman, and skated out to the hash marks, and the hum didn't come.
Instead he heard everything. The PA guy's big Vegas voice. Somebody in the third row yelling his name. And then, from the Atlantic bench, a single, carrying Russian-accented voice saying "Do not choke, Hollander, everyone is watching," and the bench laughing, and the crowd catching it and laughing too.
He hit the first four targets in five shots. Top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left. The fifth, dead centre, took him four tries. The puck kept dying on the edge of the foam like it had somewhere better to be. On the fourth try it dropped through clean and the target shattered and the clock stopped at a time that was not, when he looked up at the scoreboard, a winning time.
He skated back toward the bench. Ilya was standing at the boards, leaning over them with his chin on his gloves, looking at him with an expression that was going to end up in a lot of fan edits.
"Very bad," Ilya said. "Worst I ever saw. Were you thinking about something else?"
"No."
"You were thinking about something else."
"Get off the boards, Rozanov, you're up after the guy from Tampa."
Ilya went fourth in the hardest-shot competition and broke a hundred and three miles an hour and lost to a defenceman from Nashville who was built like a vending machine. He didn't seem to care. He came off the ice to a standing ovation he had not earned, waving like a pageant winner, and when he dropped onto the bench next to Shane he was breathing hard and smiling, and his shoulder bumped Shane's and stayed.
On the jumbotron above them, between events, they were running fan signs. A couple from Quebec holding GO HABS GO, which was the wrong team and the wrong decade. A guy in an enormous Leafs jersey holding I SKIPPED MY OWN WEDDING FOR THIS. A woman in a Raiders jersey holding a sign she had clearly made with glitter glue and real love: HOLLANOV FOREVER.
The arena cheered. The camera lingered on it. The woman, realising she was on the big screen, screamed and waved the sign over her head.
Beside Shane, Ilya had gone very still.
"What is Hollanov," he said.
"I don't know." Shane's mouth had gone dry. "Some... thing. People do it. With names."
"With whose names?"
"Ours, obviously."
"Why would they do that?"
"I don't know, Ilya, it's the internet, they did it to Crosby and Ovechkin." He didn't know why he knew that. He wished he didn't. "It's a joke. It's because we hate each other. It's... ironic."
The jumbotron cut to the next sign, something about a dog. Ilya was still looking up at it. Under the bench, where the cameras couldn't see, his knee pressed against Shane's, hard, the way you'd squeeze someone's hand.
"Hollanov," Ilya said again, trying the word out, and Shane heard the delight starting to come back into his voice, which was much, much worse. "Is a good name. Sounds like a Russian city. I would visit."
"Please stop."
"Population: two."
"I swear to God," Shane said, and got up and went to stand at the other end of the bench, next to a goalie from Florida who wanted to talk about his kids' hockey camp, and nodded at the right times, and could still feel the exact spot on his knee for the rest of the night.
He was in the hotel elevator at 11:15, alone, the Boston hat in his hand because he'd forgotten to give it back, when his phone buzzed.
Hayden: dude
Hayden: DUDE
Hayden: are you seeing this
Hayden had sent a link. Shane's thumb hovered and then pressed it before his brain could stop it.
It was the league's own account. Twenty-two seconds of footage from the tunnel that afternoon, slowed down and set to some song Shane didn't know: Ilya reaching out to tug the Boston hat down over his eyes, Shane pushing it up, and then a part Shane hadn't known anyone had caught. A moment after Ilya walked away, Shane standing alone in the tunnel, looking after him. Just looking. His face doing something unguarded and soft that he had never in his life seen it do on a screen.
The caption said: the rivalry is so real 😭 #NHLAllStar #Hollanov
It had four hundred thousand views. As he watched, it became four hundred and twelve thousand.
The elevator doors opened on twenty-three. Shane didn't get out. He stood there holding the hat while the doors closed again, and the elevator, which had not been told where to go, sat humming in the shaft.
Then he pressed a button. Not twenty-three. The number on the little paper sleeve in his pocket.