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Tonight was the home opener. Shane’s entire adult life, he’s had a routine for the day: lunch with his parents, arrive early at the arena, do his stretches and his warmups, be ready to talk to his team. Win. Go out with the team afterwards, because it was the home opener, because he could put in that face time, shore up their camaraderie at the beginning of this year’s slog. Believe, every year, really truly believe, that they’d win the Cup this year, that this team would do it. First in Montreal, and then in Ottawa. In Ottawa he didn’t have the C, though he ended up with the A the last several years. In Ottawa he had Ilya.
And now he’s retired. This will be the second season he’s not on the ice. Last year was weird, and empty, and incredibly busy, and time moved funny, slow drizzles of hours that took forever, and then weeks that blew by before he’d blinked. Doctor’s appointments, lots of physio, a surgery apiece for him and for Ilya, meetings with lawyers and accountants and agents and managers, all wanting to know what came next. Ilya wants to coach, and expand the Irina Foundation to include a Boston outpost, and be in the movies. All reasonable goals for a hockey legend with four Cups, and still the hottest man Shane’s ever seen. Shane still doesn’t totally know what he wants to do, and it gnaws at him. He’s never had less of a plan than he does now.
They went to a bunch of Centaurs home games last season, sitting in the box with the GM, Thibodeau. That home opener, a year ago now, was one of the hardest nights of Shane’s life. He knew, objectively, that it was time to retire, that he’d lost enough speed to matter, that his shoulder just didn’t have any more big hits in it. He knew it was time to go, before he started that pathetic slide some guys got, when they didn’t know when to quit, when they hung on long enough you thought maybe someone should take them out behind the barn and shoot them, as a mercy. And Ilya wanted to go, needed to go because his ankle didn’t have a lot left, and Shane didn’t want to do it without Ilya. He’d dreamed his whole life of making it to the show, but the show turned out to be dependent on one guy, for him. It wasn’t the show anymore if Ilya wasn’t there.
So they watched Ottawa beat the Guardians from the box, not from the bench, and Shane spent half the game with his hand clenched in a fist, trying to tighten around a hockey stick he wasn’t holding. Haas was a veteran by now, with an A of his own, and it warmed Shane’s heart to see him rallying the new rookies (who looked like actual fucking infants, one of the signs that Shane could admit meant it was probably time to hang up his skates: when your teammates could in fact literally be your children). They executed on the power play just the way Shane and Ilya had taught Haasy all those years ago. He was so proud, and only mostly heartbroken he wasn’t out there with them.
That was last year’s home opener. This year, they’re back in the GM’s box but only for the first period: now they have a baby, and he has a bedtime.
So it’s the night of the home opener, and instead of being at the bar with his team (and, depending on the year, forcing himself to do shots or steadfastly refusing more than two beers or not drinking at all and anxious about being hassled to hook up or furtively texting Ilya or holding his husband’s hand waiting for his turn in the pool game), he’s home with his baby. It’s 12:17 in the morning, and most years he’d still be out but wishing he was home, but this year he was asleep by ten but he’s up again now giving his son a bottle. Shane can’t believe this is his life, in ways both beautiful and terrifying. Ilya is asleep in their bed, because it’s Shane’s turn for night feedings. Anya, a dignified old lady now, sleeps in her orthopedic dog bed next to the living room fireplace. Their son eagerly drinks his bottle, making the soft grunting noises Shane finds painfully dear. He’s only turned on one dim lamp in the nursery, and he’s so tired, and so in love. Five months in and he still sometimes can’t believe this baby is real, and his, and Ilya’s, and he’s a father. He’ll be a father for the rest of his life. He’ll never be a professional hockey player again, but he’ll always be a dad.
Ilya told him, once, that he never really thought about retiring because he didn’t actually think he’d live that long. Shane couldn’t have put it into words at the time, doesn’t think he could now either, but despite his very careful planning for his future – the investment of his sponsorship money, the real estate portfolio, the quarterly meetings with his “wealth manager,” what a phrase, the endless tending to his physical health – Shane couldn’t actually picture retiring either. Who was he, without hockey? What could he possibly fill his time with?
But that was before. There is no before Ilya, not really, not his career or his adult life. He met his husband when he was seventeen years old, and in ways it took him a long time to understand, they were tied together from the moment they met. They were pissed as hell about it, fought each other, denied it at some turns and leaned into it at others. Maybe it could have gone another way, maybe the denial could have won out: Shane could have been a little more afraid, Ilya could have been a little more destructive. Looking back, it seems like they got infinite chances to get it right, but Shane knows that’s not true, that their luck would have run out eventually. He could have not had this, he could have missed this life.
So there is no before Ilya, but there is before they admitted their feelings and made their first (stupid, in hindsight) plan for how to keep their careers and still have each other. That was before Ottawa, and getting to live together, and marriage, before Shane knew what it was like to fully entwine his life – his legacy – with someone else, on purpose. The push and pull years over, and now only pulling in unison, pushing together.
Towards the end of their careers, they started talking seriously about parenthood, about what they wanted that to look like, the logistics of acquiring a child (“acquiring a child is a weird way to put it, Ilya”), did they want to wait until retirement, how many nannies was too many for two busy millionaires. They decided: yes to waiting, yes to surrogacy, and yes to Ilya being the biological father, at least of their first kid. (Ilya lost the bet there, each of them badly wanted the other to be the bio dad.) The agency they worked with was great, but they both admitted the whole process of finding a surrogate, and choosing a separate egg donor, was weird and maybe sometimes a little creepy.
But. In the end they got their son, their tiny perfect miracle, out of it. It’s too soon to say if he’ll keep the blue eyes he has now, so like his Papa’s, or if the soft downy fuzz on his head will stay that golden color, turn into the riot of curls Shane loves so much on his husband. Shane hopes so, badly, wants so much to see the love of his life in his son’s face. Wants Ilya to have that tether, a biological relative to see his goodness reflected in.
+ + +
This year’s home opener is their son’s first ever hockey game. Harris, now head of communications for the team, gifts them a pair of branded baby headphones. Decked out in his Centaurs onesie and toque and headphones, he’s a walking billboard for the team (or would be if he wasn’t five months old and could barely hold his own head up). They take him down to the locker room, where the team has decorated Ilya’s old locker as if it were his now. The Centaurs have decided his number is 105 (24 plus 81), and they give Shane and Ilya a baby jersey with that number and his name, Hollander-Rozanov in impossibly tiny letters fit across the back of the tiny jersey. Ilya sniffs and scratches his nose in the way that everyone knows means he’s trying not to cry, but then he does start crying, for real. He’s so much more tender now, years of therapy and meds and getting to love Shane out loud has made his soft and gooey center so much closer to the surface. The Russian Menace, a known softy. He rails against the loss of his image but Shane knows he doesn’t really mean it, loves that his guys know he’s safe, and he’s still a terror on the ice. Other teams don’t know the softer side of Ilya Rozanov the same way.
Shane has to desperately blink back tears himself, holding his son’s jersey in his hands, smoothing his hands over the name and number. The new social media person for the team, an extremely tall nonbinary twentysomething called Juniper, takes endless photos, murmuring “oh this is very good” to themself, but has already promised them their son’s face wouldn’t be visible in any post the team makes, before Shane and Ilya even had to ask.
Their son is a pretty chill baby, as these things go: he’s already been on airplanes several times, crossed borders and timezones and slept in his car seat through a board meeting and spent a photo shoot strapped to his nanny’s chest in a sling, the nanny scrolling her phone while Shane and Ilya posed shirtless for CCM. In New York when he was just two months old, Rose – a few months out from her second Oscar win – wouldn’t agree to give him back for an entire brunch. Ruby spent six weeks living with them over the summer, serving as Ilya’s assistant and backup babysitter, when needed. (Ruby and Uncle Ilya have a bond that runs deep, two chaos beings recognizing themselves in each other. Shane and Arthur have always gravitated to each other, usually in a separate room from the rest of the party to catch a ten-minute break.)
So it’s not a huge surprise their son’s a champ at the game. He looks around in wide-eyed wonder at everything he sees, and can’t keep his hands off the GM’s tie. Thibodeau loves holding him, tells Shane he misses when his kids were babies “and none of them have seen fit to give me grandkids yet, so I’m getting my fix with yours.” He’s a kind, jovial man who’s smarter than he likes people to think, and he told Shane, back when he first joined the team, that he knew better than to try to tell Shane Hollander what to do. “I want a Cup,” he’d said, leaning against his desk, tapping a legal pad against his thigh. “I want a Cup real bad, and it seems to me that getting the hell out of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov’s way is probably the simplest path there. You boys tell me what you need, and I’ll get it.”
Ottawa has been so good to them, better than Shane knew a team could be, and he already had three Cups the day he arrived. No part of the plan ever involved Shane moving to the Centaurs, but it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to his hockey, probably.
Thibodeau holds their son most of the first period, and he only starts getting fussy during the first intermission. Shane and Ilya knew they probably couldn’t stay the whole game, not his first time, so they’re okay heading out. The GM kisses their son’s chubby cheek, sniffs his soft baby hair, and as he hands him over to Ilya, says, “It goes faster than you think, boys. Soak it all in,” which is the kind of nonsense platitude you hear all the time as new parents but it’s true, isn’t it?
+ + +
Right after Haas scored on the power play, at that first home opener last year, with a beautiful assist from the rookie Jimenez, Ilya had reached out and squeezed Shane’s hand without looking at him, without breaking his conversation with Wiebe’s wife. He’d known, the way he so often knew, what Shane was feeling without Shane ever having to say. He knew Shane was a mix of feelings and so many of them were bad and he was seething with jealousy and regret but also: those are his boys. His men. He taught them that, helped make them the skaters and players they are, maybe even helped make them the men they are, and they can do it without him, and isn’t that what a good teacher does? Isn’t he so proud of them, too? Doesn’t he love them? Isn’t this game beautiful?
+ + +
When they get home from the game, it’s bathtime, which they do together, already moving as a team to gather his little tub and fill it with warm water and bicker a little about the temperature and one of them holds his tiny slippery body while the other washes him. Those first baths were terrifying – how can the most precious thing in the whole world be so small, so easy to mishandle accidentally – but already their confidence and competence at this has exploded. Shane was never worried, exactly – he’s good at everything, and he’s watched enough knucklehead teammates raise kids to know he could do it too. He has the best role model in his own dad, now the world’s best grandpa. And he has Ilya. They can do anything together.
The baby doesn’t love bathtime, cries sad little mews during much of it, and Shane loves to hear Ilya murmuring soft Russian to him, telling him he’s being brave and it’s ok, it’s almost over, malysh, you did such a good job.
After, they zip him into his sleep onesie and read him a story, curled up on the couch in his nursery together. Ilya takes storytime seriously, even though Shane admittedly doesn’t fully understand why you’d bother to read a book to a baby, a baby who cannot understand any part of it. But Ilya is determined, says it’s important to form this habit now, and the sight of his husband reading Moo, Baa, La La La! to their son never fails to make Shane feel like he was just slammed into the boards unexpectedly, like all the breath is knocked from his lungs, in the very best way.
+ + +
Years ago, another middle of the night, Shane woke up Ilya to pitch him a plan: for Ilya to move to Ottawa, for them to start a charity together, for them to hide themselves from the world until after retirement. For them to steal what snatches of time together they could get, to love on the periphery of hockey.
It was the best plan Shane could come up with at the time. Twenty-six years old, only newly out even to himself, hadn’t yet said “I love you” out loud, two Cups and a few years as captain and he thought he knew everything, thought he knew what the world would give him. The plan he created was so small, in retrospect. He thought he was being brave to imagine they could have anything, knew better than to think they could have everything.
They didn’t get everything. Montreal will be a sore spot in Shane’s heart for – well, maybe not the rest of his life, he doesn’t know. But it still is now. He loved that team and that city and he gave them everything he had. Those first two years in Ottawa, they had to hire round-the-clock security, had endless meetings with the team and the provincial police and the RCMP, even missed a couple games over it. There’s a talking head at ESPN who ended up getting blacklisted from covering Ottawa’s games, he was so bad at hiding his disgust. A lot of reporters asked him a lot of really invasive questions. A couple times people went through their trash. Shane only stopped having nightmares about Russia a couple months after Ilya’s citizenship ceremony. Roger Crowell never would look him in the eye again, and the new commissioner isn’t much better. Most of the guys Shane played with in Montreal never talked to him again. The hits on the ice got harder, meaner, the chirps just pure fucking hate speech.
But they got other things Shane hadn’t known he could even ask for, hadn’t thought to want. Sharing a hotel room on roadies with Ilya. A coach who’s not a total asshole. Grabbing beers in Boston with Marly and Connors, leaning back in a booth and listening to Ilya and his old friends shoot the shit. Barbecues at Bood’s, where families were actually welcome and competitive drinking wasn’t part of the vibe. Seeing his parents so often. A level of trust with his teammates that made skating across the ice feel like flying. The look on Ilya’s face when he spots a bi pride flag in the crowd at an arena. Saying “my husband.” Saying “my husband” and having everyone on the team be truly, actually fine with it.
Lifting the Cup with his husband. Doing it again, and a third time. Coaching their camps with Ilya, cutting the ribbon of a hospital wing their money built with Ilya. Meeting with Yuna and Farah and the new CEO Yuna insisted on a few years ago, charting a path for their foundation together, a plan to do the most good they possibly can.
Retiring with Ilya, crowds cheering them as their jerseys were raised to the rafters together.
Having a baby with Ilya, bringing their son home from the hospital. Ilya holding their baby – their baby – and singing him a silly Russian song, asking him, “do you want to go see Daddy?” as he gently shifts their son into Shane’s arms. Ilya goofing off in their gym, doing squats with their son in a sling on his chest. Ilya laying on the floor next to the baby, making his giraffe toy dance so he’ll laugh, eyes bright with wonder.
+ + +
The baby finishes his bottle. Shane gently bounces him against his shoulder, making little shh sounds even though he isn’t being very noisy. The baby fists Shane’s hair, grabbing a few strands at the nape of his neck and holding on, surprising grip strength for one so little.
“We’re ok,” Shane tells him, rubbing his back. A year into retirement, his second season off the ice, still not sure what he wants to do. Ilya is consulting with the Bears, spent a couple weeks at their training camp. He filmed a bit role in a comedy this summer, just a couple lines, playing a heightened version of himself, and the screener they got last week shows he’s a natural. Shane knew he would be. The CEO of the Irina Foundation wants Shane to help hire a new chief development officer, so Shane’s been reading up on that. Yuna suggested he take some business classes, and he’s thinking about it. He can’t find a table like he has in mind for their entryway, so he’s toying with the idea of learning to build his own. Coaching offers came in from a few teams, MLH down to U15s, but the only one that’s even tempted him is the local PWHL team, wanting him to work with a couple of their best forwards on playmaking. He's going to say yes later this week.
Shane looks down at his son, with his eyes closed, veins visible in his eyelids, paper thin and so fragile. His whole tiny body, so fragile. He’s only just started to smile, to laugh a little. He has so much time ahead of him, and someday, a time that feels impossibly far from tonight but really isn’t, Shane and Ilya will lace him into his first pair of skates and hold his hands as he steps out onto the ice for the first time. Maybe he will love it, like they do; maybe those first tottering steps will swiftly turn into sure, smooth, gliding skating, maybe he will know in his bones that this is his home, that he belongs here.
Maybe he won’t. Maybe skating will be just fine for him, or not his thing at all. Maybe he’ll fall in love with pottery, or the piano, or baking. Maybe rather than having one great passion that dominates his life he’ll like lots of things a normal amount (Shane can’t really imagine what that’s like, but he’ll love his son all the same if that’s how he is). Maybe he’ll inherit Ilya’s sense of humor and ability to charm anyone. Maybe he’ll inherit his grandfather’s love of puzzles, or his obaasan’s business savvy. Maybe he’ll have Irina’s eyes. So much love went into the making of this singular human baby, a miracle. Isn’t this game beautiful?