Chapter Text
“OTTAWA CENTAURS WIN 2022 STANLEY CUP”
June 13, 2022 Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Centaurs have captured their very first Stanley Cup! Captained by Ilya Rozanov, the Centaurs have won the Stanley Cup, defeating the Colorado Blizzards in game 6 of the Stanley Cup finals. This is Rozanov’s second Cup, as well as the fourth for his teammate and husband, Shane Hollander, who also received this year’s Conn Smythe Trophy for the playoffs’ most valuable player. The Centaurs...
*****
“MOB BURNS CENTAURS JERSEYS, MERCH OUTSIDE TEAM HQ”
June 14, 2022 Ottawa Citizen
*****
The song Harris had programmed as his phone’s ringtone seemed decidedly less cheerful than usual as it cut through his pounding head. He flailed for the phone, knocking it off the bedside table. Troy groaned beside him as he scrambled to pick it up. Perhaps partying until the wee hours hadn’t been the best idea, but Harris felt it was thoroughly deserved. The Cens had won the Cup! It had been a long and difficult season, but the team had played lights out and had the trophy to show for it. Surely they had earned both their celebration and their sleep?
Answering the phone, he was woken thoroughly by the voice of the team’s administrative assistant, Aimee. She was always a bit nasal for his liking. “You’re needed in the office. ASAP.” She hung up as abruptly as she spoke.
Harris sighed, and levered himself upright. The world spun for a moment, but he managed to steady himself. He leaned over to kiss Troy’s forehead (the world spun again), and then picked his way to the bathroom. Several painkillers and a quick shower got him on the road, and an extra-large coffee did the rest. By the time he was swiping his employee pass and entering the office, he was humming. He gave a jaunty wave to Aimee where she sat scowling at the reception desk.
He stopped humming as he entered the communications room. Bill always claimed he found it distracting. He never had any trouble focusing when there were crowds of screaming fans on the screens, but someone humming or tapping their pen could drive him insane. Bill was a brilliant analyst, though, so Harris was happy to indulge him. The Cens had struck gold when they’d poached him from the Redblacks last summer. Bill had been lucky, too. He hated football.
At her edit bay, Ashley was pulling together a video of celly clips. She carefully zoomed in on the footage where Ilya and Troy crashed into each other yelling after a beautiful top-shelf goal. “Ooh, which game was it when they all piled on Wyatt? That was a good one.”
“March 12,” Bill called, not taking his eyes off the charts and numbers scrolling across his screen. Harris still didn’t quite understand all the analytics Bill worked with (math had never been his favourite subject), but he trusted Bill’s judgement. “Aaron’s got something you need to see,” he added to Harris.
There was a graph on Bill’s screen tracking the engagement with various posts. One of them in particular seemed to be gaining some traction. After a moment, Harris realized it wasn’t the official Centaurs victory announcement, nor the official NHL one.
“It’s someone bitching about the team,” Aaron, the team’s social media intern, said. “They didn’t celebrate properly, or something.”
“Huh?” Harris put his empty cup down on the desk and leaned forward to get a better look over Aaron’s shoulder.
“They seem to think the team didn’t celebrate Hollander enough. I don’t know. This person’s saying the team took too long to give him the Cup. He took a victory lap like everyone else, didn’t he?”
Harris nodded absently and turned to boot up his own computer. “After Luca. Are they mad about that? Did they want him to hog all the attention?”
“Apparently, ‘he was an integral part of their victory and the team treated him like some random nobody.’” Aaron raised his eyebrows at him.
“They used the word “integral”?” Harris asked, incredulous.
“It seems our poster has a decent vocabulary,” Aaron said, “if not a decent grasp of the inner workings of a hockey team. It’s there in the name. They’re a team. Who the fuck cares what order people go in?”
“So let’s emphasize that,” Harris instructed. “They won as a team, they’re all part of the group... Point out that Hollander’s a great team player. He’s always got good stats for assists, so see if you can’t work that in.”
Harris’s teammates nodded and got to work.
*****
There were 117 posts, and the engagement on them kept rising.
Harris was fairly confident this wasn’t just one person trolling. It seemed highly unlikely that someone who used the word “integral” would also use the kind of language he was looking at now.
It seemed the united team message had been the wrong tack.
One user had posted a list of Hollander’s stats, side-by-side with each of the rest of the team’s. Hollander’s were highest, though Ilya’s were close, and the rest of the team’s were lower (though still very respectable). Harris couldn’t deny that Hollander was a good player, but these people were acting like he had won the Cup all on his own!
A number of people seemed to be complaining about the player interviews. According to them, when the team was interviewed after the finals, they were “downplaying” Hollander’s achievements. Harris watched the clips in question, but they seemed fine.
Sure, Young had claimed that the victory was nearly entirely down to him, with a little bit of assistance from Ilya, but no one really took him seriously.
Bood had acknowledged that Hollander scored the winning goal, and Hayes had talked about how helpful it was to have two strong forward lines, identifying an assist by Luca as a particular highlight. Ilya had joked about how with both him and the second-best player on the same team, winning had been inevitable. None of the others had mentioned Hollander at all.
Luca had suggested that Ilya was perhaps more deserving of the Conn Smythe, which was a perfectly valid opinion to have. Ilya had played incredibly this season, after all. It might have been his best performance yet. He was certainly a shoo-in for the season MVP, even if Hollander had gotten it for the playoffs.
Troy had praised Ilya’s leadership, and thanked the coaches, team and, of course, the fans. He’d also (Harris would deny he was blushing if anyone asked) praised the team’s media staff.
Hollander’s own answers were fairly bland. He praised the team’s hard work, thanked the usual people, and said absolutely nothing of any interest.
Ashley had once asked Harris if he could get Hollander to say something more interesting in interviews, because they were always hard to find clips from. “I’m not saying he needs to say anything controversial or whatever,” she’d said. “Maybe he could just try to be a bit less of a robot? It’s the same six lines all the time. The only way you can even tell which game he’s talking about is he usually says something like ‘New York gave us a good fight tonight’. Would it kill him to have a personality?” Watching his interview, Harris had to agree. He’d done his best, trying to get Hollander to ease up a little, maybe have a bit of fun, but Hollander always just listened politely, nodded, said he’d do his best, and then went out and said exactly the same things all over again. Harris didn’t even think he was doing it on purpose.
Nothing in these interviews would explain the reaction the public was having.
“Do you think we missed something?” Bill asked. “Maybe one of the players shoved him, and we’ve just overlooked it somehow?” He sounded skeptical, but Harris was willing to entertain any wild idea at this point.
“I’ve been looking at this fucking footage for the last four hours,” Ashley said. “Don’t you think I’d have noticed if there were something like that?” She, like Harris, had clearly anticipated having the day off, and was a little tetchy.
“What’s one more view then?” Harris suggested, and they crowded around her monitor.
Ilya shook the Commissioner’s hand, then hoisted the Cup over his head. The cheering in the arena was incredible as he kissed the Cup and set off on his victory lap. When he returned, he handed it off to Bood with a clap on the shoulder, who took it for his own lap, whooping. Troy was up next, and Harris felt the pride swelling in his chest as Troy skated his lap, Cup held proudly over his head. There were multiple rainbow flags waving in the crowd. At a hockey game. It still felt surreal.
Troy handed the Cup over to Evan, who nearly dropped it, but was able to recover with a laugh. Chewy seemed to be in utter disbelief when he took the Cup, staring at it for a moment before Evan nudged him to take his lap. Chewy handed it off to Hazy, who was definitely crying when he delivered the Cup to Luca. Luca had worked so hard for this day. Harris knew he’d put in extra hours practicing, and this moment was well-deserved. Luca gave the Cup to Hollander, who took his lap without fanfare, then passed it on to Dillon, and it continued down the line.
After he handed the Cup over, Hollander skated over to Ilya and they hugged each other tightly. They shared a fairly chaste kiss – not nearly as dramatic as Hunter’s, regrettably (it would have made fabulous content), but still rather sweet. Ilya would probably have preferred something more demonstrative and romantic, but after working with him for a year, Harris knew Hollander was just kind of reserved. He could barely ever get the man to share anything personal, no matter how he tried. Hollander was probably allergic to PDA. It was good of Ilya to be so considerate of that.
“See?” Ashley said. “No unexpected violence. There’s nothing there.”
So the fans were worked up about nothing. Harris knew there would be no way to refute that, so their best approach at this point would be to give them something else to talk about. The team tossed around suggestions. Bill proposed getting involved in the speculation about the upcoming draft picks, to stir the pot a little and get fans excited. Ashley was rather alarmingly enthusiastic about the idea to try chirping the socials of another team. That felt like a more drastic approach than was warranted, so Harris had nixed the idea, though he’d keep it in his back pocket, just in case.
The idea they all agreed on was a series of polls. Best game-day look. Cutest picture with a dog. Funniest wipeout. Ilya was winning that last one by a mile – he had been doing a celly, tripped over his own skates, and propelled himself into the other team’s net. San Jose’s goalie had not been amused. Ilya still insisted that that should count as a second goal.
*****
Another trending post popped up on his feed. Harris groaned.
“Think anyone’ll notice if I make a quick Tim’s run?” he asked.
“Isn’t that what Aaron’s here for?” Bill called. He was hunched over a small laptop, which was now displaying one of those graphs with the clusters of data points. Harris had tried to encourage him to use a proper monitor, but he was stubborn. His back would not be thanking him later!
Ashley snorted, not looking up from her own computer, where she was now compiling highlight reels for each of the players. On her screen, Tanner Dillon slipped the puck in past the goalie’s blocker and raised his arms in celebration. He’d really come a long way this past year. He had definitely been putting in the work.
A collection of Hazy’s most epic saves was already primed and ready to be posted, and Aaron had just finished colour-correcting a package of Young’s greatest passes and checks. (Someone really needed to do something about the lighting in Calgary. It could be the lights or maybe the camera, but all the clips from there ended up yellowish.)
Aaron got up good-naturedly, collecting orders on his way out the door. He returned a moment later, sans coffee and donuts.
“We’ve been told to stay in the building,” he said, looking rather perturbed.
Harris frowned. “I didn’t get an email,” he started, but was interrupted by the ding of a notification.
There were protesters outside the building. The email was rather vague (typical of Aimee, unfortunately, who never seemed to consider her audience). It wasn’t clear if there were five or five hundred. They were advised to remain indoors until the situation was resolved.
Harris looked around at his exhausted team. “I’ll make sure we get overtime pay,” he offered, a little lamely.
“The Cens just won the Cup,” Ashley said. “Make it holiday pay and you’re on.”
Harris loved his team. “Done.”
“Right.” Bill straightened and cracked his knuckles. “What do you say we pick a fight with the Admirals?”
Aaron gamely put on a pot of the dubious coffee that the front office kept stocked. Harris appreciated his attitude. Being an intern could be a thankless job sometimes, and Aaron was really rising to the occasion. He would have to recommend him for promotion.
For his own part, Harris raided his desk drawers for coins and went to clear out the vending machines.
He shot Troy a quick text, letting him know what was happening so he wouldn’t worry. Troy was probably still asleep, worn out after a long hard season. He’d worked so hard for that Cup, and he deserved to feel good about it. Harris wasn’t going to let some disgruntled fans get in the way of that.