Pagans in Daylight: Heated Rivalry, Tom Stoppard, and the Quiet Engine of Change.
“We have work to do in preparation for that.”
That is Kim Davis, senior vice president of the National Hockey League, speaking in May 2026 about the second season of Heated Rivalry. The sentence does what useful sentences in good drama often do: it carries one meaning on the surface and another underneath.
The surface is administrative. Season two, expected in April 2027, is set to draw from Rachel Reid’s The Long Game, the sequel in which Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are forced toward the question the first story has spent years postponing: what happens when private love can no longer remain private?
In the novel, that question eventually takes institutional form. Commissioner Roger Crowell, on discovering that two of his marquee players are in love, treats the relationship not as a human reality but as a reputational problem. Gary Bettman, Davis said, has communicated to the producers that this fictional response is not how he would behave. Then came the line: “We have work to do in preparation for that.”
What sits beneath that sentence is more interesting than the clarification itself.
The league has read, or been briefed on, a fictional scene in which its institutional double behaves badly. It has registered enough of itself, or enough of what an audience might register, to begin preparing its answer before the relevant episode has even aired. That is not only publicity management. It is recognition.
It is the moment an artwork becomes uncomfortable to the body it depicts.
The NHL is not preparing for a vague atmosphere of discomfort. It is preparing for a particular kind of scene: one in which hockey’s language of legacy, discipline, reputation and masculine restraint is turned against two men who have given their lives to the sport.
Everything in this essay leads toward that scene.
First, the groundswell, and the question of why now.
In late 2025, Crave released a six-episode hockey romance adapted from Reid’s Game Changers novels in Jacob Tierney’s adaptation for television. The series followed Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov from teenage rivalry through the long, secret development of their relationship: the international prospect tournament, the draft, the hotel rooms, the constructed media rivalry, the years of intermittent intimacy, the Vegas encounter, Boston, the cottage, and finally the first fragile move toward a shared future.
The show did not merely find its intended audience. It escaped it.
Partly that happened because audiences had grown tired of two opposite but equally limiting versions of the queer story. In one, queer love is allowed to exist only if sanitised into something decorative and non-threatening. In the other, queer love exists chiefly to be punished, mourned or made instructive. Heated Rivalry refuses both.
Shane and Ilya are not symbols first. They are people first.
They are competitive, vain, funny, frightened, loyal, controlling, tender and occasionally cruel. They are not ennobled by suffering into moral cleanliness. They are frequently bad at love. That is part of why the love feels real.
The timing also counts.
The old masculine compact in elite sport has begun to fail. Younger athletes live in a culture of continuous visibility. Fans increasingly expect public figures not merely to perform but to narrate themselves. Hockey, among the major North American sports, has remained unusually sealed around this subject: no openly gay active NHL player, no openly gay retired NHL player, repeated controversies around Pride nights and Pride tape, and a culture still deeply invested in stoicism, hardness and the careful policing of softness.
The silence had not disappeared. It had simply become audible.
So onto the screen Shane and Ilya came.
Viewers did not simply enjoy Hudson Williams as Shane and Connor Storrie as Ilya. They knew them on sight. The secrecy landed harder than the sex did, which is not necessarily what anyone expected. The show became disruptive not because it placed queer characters near hockey culture, but because it placed queer love inside hockey culture: inside the rituals, the machinery, the locker-room codes, the emotional discipline the sport demands of its young men.
Shane and Ilya are not rebels standing outside the league. They are its ideal products.
Shane is disciplined, admired, contained almost to the point of disappearance. He has spent years confusing self-erasure with goodness. Ilya is brilliant, theatrical, lonely, and exhausted by the performance of himself. He is also, one should note in the spring of 2026, a Russian, which means his fictional love is, in his real-world country, a private treason. Storrie plays him as someone always moving faster than his own hurt, using humour, sex, arrogance and provocation as ways of staying just ahead of rejection.
That is worth pausing on, because Ilya is not simply waiting to be chosen.
He is the one who keeps returning. He names more truths than Shane does. He risks humiliation more openly. He asks for more because he understands earlier that secrecy is not neutral. Or perhaps because his silence has cost him in different ways. Shane’s repression is not morally purer than Ilya’s volatility. Quietness is not the same thing as depth. Sometimes it is fear with better manners.
Hockey made them both, with their assent and against their interests, and now the culture that produced their devotion cannot comfortably survive the public truth of it.
What Heated Rivalry understands is that masculinity in elite hockey is often constructed through emotional starvation.
Boys leave home young. They billet with strangers. They learn quickly which emotions are survivable in a dressing room and which are not. Pain is admirable. Vulnerability is suspect. Humiliation becomes ritual. Coaches praise discipline, hardness, control. Need becomes embarrassing. Tenderness becomes dangerous.
The league has spent a century teaching men how not to say this.
And yet hockey is not merely the villain of the story. That would be too easy, and less true.
The tragedy is that hockey also gives Shane and Ilya the vocabulary through which they first know each other. It teaches ritual, endurance, bodily trust, obsessive attention to another person’s rhythm. It teaches men to communicate physically long before they can do so verbally. Shane and Ilya fall in love partly through habits the sport itself has trained into them.
Hockey knows how to produce intimacy between men. It simply does not know what to do once that intimacy becomes visible as love.
The cost of that contradiction is everywhere.
Shane withdraws when intimacy becomes emotionally visible. Ilya punishes with silence when he anticipates abandonment. Their relationship often carries the syntax of harm: control, secrecy, testing, retreat, punishment, sex standing in for speech. The love is not merely healing. It is also deforming. They wound each other because each has learned love through structures that reward concealment and punish need.
They hurt each other for years before they learn how to stop.
That is why the story is more interesting than a simple liberation narrative, and also why it is something more than a trauma narrative. The wounding here is not delivered to Shane and Ilya from outside as instruction or punishment. It comes from love, and it produces more love. That is the difference.
Their love is beautiful, sustaining, obsessive, damaging, necessary and transformative all at once. It saves them. It also costs them. The fact that both things are true is what gives the story its force.
And yet the show survives this material because it has not forgotten that they are also funny.
The teasing counts. The chirping counts. The vanity, the pettiness, the competitive stupidity, the dirty jokes, the little cruelties that turn into flirtation: all of it keeps the relationship human. Without humour, Shane and Ilya become sacred objects. With humour, they remain two men who annoy each other, desire each other, wound each other, forgive each other, and keep coming back.
Sex works for similar reasons.
Tierney’s adaptation understands that sex is not an interruption in this story. It is conversation. Shane and Ilya use physical intimacy as language long before either can speak plainly about fear, need or devotion. The eroticism refuses shame, but it also refuses abstraction. It is not there merely to prove representation. It is there because these men know how to touch before they know how to confess. And yet, this is the harder part: touch is also what they reach for when they cannot bear to confess. The same vocabulary that lets them know each other is the one they hide behind.
That is one of the story’s sharpest insights. Sometimes the body tells the truth before the mouth can bear it.
Rachel Reid did not write a polemic. She wrote love stories. The distinction holds. A polemic asks readers to agree. A love story asks them to recognise. By the time a reader has lived with Shane and Ilya across Heated Rivalry and The Long Game, disapproval begins to feel emotionally incoherent. Not because an argument has won, but because a human reality has been made too vivid to dismiss.
The adaptation inherits that act of recognition and gives it bodies.
Williams plays Shane with restraint so exact it almost hurts to watch: the over-rehearsed speech, the held posture, the exhaustion beneath composure. Storrie plays Ilya’s charisma as labour. Charm is not confidence; it is maintenance. He is constantly trying to remain wanted, entertaining, indispensable. Or, closer to the truth, constantly trying to be worth the effort it takes other people to love him.
Neither actor is simply performing romance. They are performing two men with very little emotional vocabulary trying to build a life large enough to contain love.
Then came the detail that weighs more than the press cycle.
Williams has alluded in interviews to private messages from closeted hockey players about what the story has meant to them. It is worth slowing down there.
Somewhere, a young man watched a fictional hockey player love another man in secret and felt his own silence become briefly unbearable. He wrote a sentence he had not been able to write elsewhere and sent it privately to a stranger.
That is the smallest unit of cultural change.
Everything else, the podcasts and the corporate statements and the articles and the defensive clarifications, is downstream of that.
Which brings us back to institutional acknowledgment.
Art does not become political only when it declares itself political. Sometimes it becomes political because it tells an emotional truth so clearly that bodies of power begin adjusting themselves around it.
That is what Davis’s sentence reveals.
It does not prove bad faith. It does not mean the NHL is a single villain with one mind. Bodies of this kind are rarely morally singular. Hockey contains sincere allies, frightened traditionalists, opportunists, decent people, cowards and men who genuinely do not yet understand the emotional world changing around them.
The league can support inclusion, benefit from queer visibility, fear reputational fallout, and still reproduce the structures that made the story plausible in the first place.
That contradiction is the point.
The mechanism is not new. Art has done this work before.
In March 1976, members of a Czech rock band were arrested at an underground festival outside Prague. The Plastic People of the Universe were not attempting any organised challenge to the regime. They mostly wanted to be left alone to make strange music. When they were tried in Plzeň that July and sentenced to prison terms of up to three and a half years for offences against socialist morality, what interested Václav Havel, who attended the trial, was not the arrest itself. It was the overreaction. Power had revealed, through its own visible anxiety, that art could expose contradictions the regime preferred to leave unspoken. Within months, Havel and others had drafted Charter 77. Within thirteen years, the Velvet Revolution had unseated the regime.
Tom Stoppard, who was born in Czechoslovakia and removed from it by history, returned to that story decades later in his play Rock ‘n’ Roll. In it, the long-haired musicians are not the heretics. They are the pagans, the ones who simply refuse to participate in the regime’s frame of reference. The regime cannot survive that refusal. It does not know how to answer it.
The comparison is not tyranny. The NHL is not the Czechoslovak Politburo. Tierney is not facing prison. Reid is not being tailed by secret police. The asymmetry is enormous and must be named.
But the pattern is familiar. An artwork tells an emotional truth too clearly. People know themselves inside it. The body of power, registering what it has seen before it can fully articulate it, begins adjusting its language.
Art is not, by itself, the engine of revolution. But it is the engine of certain kinds of revolution. The ones that begin in private rooms with one person realising they are not alone. The ones that begin in institutional offices, with senior vice presidents writing sentences they do not realise they are writing. The ones in which the regime’s overreaction tells us more than its calm would.
Before Heated Rivalry, Tierney had already spent years working in overlapping registers: queer adaptation, political comedy, hockey vernacular, Canadian masculinity, male friendship and performance. In 2015 he directed Stoppard’s Travesties at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, the play in which Tristan Tzara, Lenin and James Joyce argue in Zurich about what art is for. He has, in other words, been sitting with exactly this question for a long time. What he brought to Reid’s story was not merely fidelity, though Reid has praised the adaptation’s closeness to her work. He brought an understanding that tenderness between men need not be softened for public consumption. Nor does it need to be made noble in order to matter.
He refused to apologise for the seriousness of the love.
That seriousness is what leads us, finally, to Crowell.
In The Long Game, Shane and Ilya are no longer in the earliest stage of secrecy. They have lived through years of it. They have made plans. They have built a foundation. They have imagined careful routes toward openness. Then the decision is taken out of their hands when they are accidentally exposed through a video.
That chronology matters.
They are not simply discovered in a careless moment and then instantly brave. The exposure arrives after years of calculation, partial preparation and emotional strain. It is not liberation at first. It is crisis: heavier, more domestic, more exhausted than the clandestine eroticism of Heated Rivalry, concerned now with permanence and the practical burden of building a life that can survive daylight.
Crowell summons them into an official setting. He is not written as frothingly hateful. He is calm, managerial, reasonable. That is what makes the scene frightening. Modern institutions rarely announce cruelty as cruelty. They call it prudence. They call it brand management. They call it protecting the players from themselves.
Crowell frames the relationship as a reputational problem. He makes legacy the weapon. Concealment is presented as maturity. Silence is reframed as professionalism.
The cruelty of the scene lies in the politeness of the offer.
Shane absorbs the threat in silence. Ilya understands it quickly, perhaps more quickly than Shane, because some part of him has always feared that the world would eventually ask Shane to choose and that Shane might choose the safer thing. Not because Shane does not love him. Because Shane has spent his whole life mistaking safety for virtue.
Shane is tired of disappearing.
Then comes the pause.
It is the load-bearing pause of the novel.
Shane is not merely deciding whether to defy a commissioner. He is fighting the whole shape of his life: obedience, discipline, reputation, invisibility, the habit of making himself smaller so that nothing breaks.
And then he chooses.
Not cleanly. Not without fear. Not as a man suddenly freed from consequence.
He is afraid.
But he chooses anyway.
“I choose him.”
Shane does not become a heretic. He becomes a pagan. He does not argue against the regime; he simply declines to live inside its frame. That is what makes the line unanswerable.
Part of why it lands is that Ilya has spent years fearing he could only be loved privately. Desired privately. Protected privately. Shane is also, in that moment, choosing the Russian boy a system has been waiting to be rid of. Shane’s sentence does not undo every harm between them. It does not make hockey safe. It does not make the league powerless. But it does destroy one arrangement: the arrangement by which Ilya’s place in Shane’s life could remain permanently hidden for the sake of everyone else’s comfort.
No, the sentence says. You are mine in daylight too.
That is the scene the NHL is preparing for.
Not because the real league is identical to Crowell. Not because every person inside hockey shares his instincts. But because audiences will understand immediately why the scene feels plausible. They will not need the metaphor explained. They will know the language. They have heard institutions speak that way before.
The danger for hockey is not that viewers will believe Gary Bettman is Roger Crowell.
The danger is that viewers will understand why Shane and Ilya are frightened before Crowell even finishes speaking.
That is what art does, in the end. It does not topple regimes. It does not legislate change. It does what Havel saw it do in 1976, and what Stoppard understood about it decades later, and what Reid understood when she sat down to write a love story instead of a polemic. It tells the truth emotionally, and it makes the lie afterwards harder to maintain.
And somewhere, when the scene reaches the screen, a closeted player may watch Shane refuse the bargain so many men have accepted silently. He may watch Ilya be chosen not as an exception, not as a secret, not as a private indulgence, but as the person Shane will not surrender.
He may still be afraid afterwards.
One scene does not fix a life.
But it may give him language.
It may give him an image.
It may make him feel, for a moment, less alone than he did the day before.
