The first time Ilya and Shane wrestle I think Ilya is SO confident because he has simply forgotten that he can only throw Shane around and pick him up because Shane lets him. He goes into it all cocky and smug and Shane immediately bodies him so hard he blacks out. Reality check of all time. 100% fatality rate no survivors. When Ilya comes to Shane is desperately googling what to do if you wrestle your boyfriend so hard he faints. Ilya is so pleased it's criminal. A core memory for everyone involved
one year when boston is deep in a cup run but montreal was struggling with injuries and got knocked out first round or something i think shane should go to the iihf world championship wearing ilya's old neckguard
Boston wins their series with Toronto in five, and then they're sitting pretty waiting for the other side of the bracket. The Metros come back from a 2-game deficit to drag it out to seven, but Florida plays physical and the Metros' defense is already spread thin from injury; Shane puts up three points in the elimination game and it's not enough. 4-3 in overtime, and the Metros are out in round one.
"Sorry," Ilya says later, when they call. "It was close."
"Yeah," Shane says. There's not much to say. "Not our year." No more words, just short harsh breaths on the line, and then: "Fuck."
If Ilya were there he would put his teeth to the tender crook of Shane's throat, press Shane down into the bed and take him apart slow. But he's in Boston and Shane's in a nondescript hotel in Miami, so instead he says, "Get in the bathroom."
"What?"
"You need a shave, yes?" Shane's beard is still patchy this early in the playoffs. Ilya's felt it scrape along the inside of his thighs, leave the skin prickling and warm. "Go do it. I will watch."
Shane's jaw works. The camera doesn't capture the flint of his eyes, the line that must be creased between his brows. It doesn't matter. Ilya knows the ways Shane will bend. He stares at the screen, hungry, and a thousand miles away Shane gets off the bed.
The view dips, goes dark, then too bright. A clatter; an angle of a bathroom counter. Shane comes back into view, a razor in hand. Hesitates. "Should I--"
"Mm."
The water runs. First the soap, and then the clean stroke of the razor. Shane's hands are steady as he works. He'd had a goal second period: a slick dangle through the D-pair, then a wrister into the top corner. The Raiders in his living room had exploded in appreciative shouts. Ilya had watched, and wanted, his mouth gone wet.
"I should do this for you," Ilya murmurs.
"Yeah?"
"You would like it, I think." He imagines being there, taking Shane's jaw in his hand. "You'd have to be very good." Ilya would be so careful with him. All that tender skin, smooth and pink. Shane's shallow breathing; his glassy eyes.
Shane lowers the razor. There's water dripping onto the counter. "Ilya."
"Touch yourself." He waits for Shane to put the razor down, a quiet click. "No, other hand."
It'll be harder for Shane, and that's what Ilya wants. It takes a second before his hand disappears under the counter. Ilya watches Shane's eyes, the teeth sinking into his lip. The hiss of his exhale, just audible over the call.
"I want to hear you," Ilya says, and finally gets a hand on his own dick. A long lazy stroke, groaning with it. Shane's breath hitches at the sound; his forearm jerks, convulsive. "Make some noise for me, okay?"
Shane does. God, he does.
***
T-1 to puck drop there's a ping on Ilya's phone: Raymonds pulled out of Team Canada. For a moment Ilya just blinks at the text, no context for it, before he remembers the fucking World Championship. Conflicts with the playoffs every year. Shane would have declined the invitation before.
You have not had enough hockey?, Ilya sends, but he knows the answer to that. He looks up where Worlds are this year, mentally marks the time difference between Boston and Bratislava. Then he tucks his phone away and gets ready to destroy Florida.
The Raiders are playing hungry this year. Ilya tries not to dwell on it, but the thought lives in him, bright and sharp-edged. One last time before he leaves. He's been here eight years, called this place home, bled and cried with these men. It's the only way he knows how to say thank you.
***
The first game is a shutout for Boston. Ilya stretches into bed with a satisfying ache all through his muscles. Shane picks up on the second ring. "Hey," he says. "You looked good out there."
"I always look good," Ilya says, preening. "When are you flying out?"
"A few days. I've been trying to pack, but I can't find my neck guard."
"You have one?" Shane doesn't normally wear one. Ilya's thoughts snag on the image of something dark around Shane's throat.
"From the juniors." Shane sounds a little sheepish. "It's comfortable, you know? I might've left it at my parents' place, I'll go over tomorrow."
The words come out without thought. "Wear mine."
Somewhere deep in his closet Ilya has one, too: a strip of fabric and plastic, worn, faded. At some point Ilya had put his name on it, the inside edge where it would lie against the hollow of his throat. Silver against the black: Илья Розанов.
Shane opens his mouth. Closes it. "I can't come to Boston," he says, which is not a no. His eyes are wide on the screen, and Ilya's teeth ache.
"I will send it to you." There's same-day delivery to Canada. The logistics aren't the problem.
"What if--" Shane swallows. "What if it's not comfortable?"
This is how Ilya knows he's won. He can be magnanimous in victory. "If you try and don't like it," he says. "Then fine, don't wear it. You can choose."
Shane's breathing hard; they both know what he'll choose. "Okay," he says. Touches his tongue to his teeth. "Okay."
***
Boston wins the next game at home, then lose one away. A grinding, dirty game, chippy from the start and stretching into 2OT. It's a lucky bounce that wins it for Florida, the kind that sticks in your teeth, and Ilya doesn't get back to the hotel until midnight.
He's exhausted when he crawls into bed. He means to go to sleep, but midnight in Florida is seven where Shane is, which means Canada is playing Norway in ten hours. Have fun, Ilya texts, absently taps open Twitter, and abruptly comes face to face with Shane.
There's a mic in his face. His hair is a sweaty fringe, probably just out from practice. Someone's asking him a question, who the fuck cares, and all Ilya sees is the dark layer of the neck guard under the collar of Shane's jersey.
Fuck. He goes hard in an instant, shocked wide awake. The way it shifts when Shane tilts his head. The bob of his throat. The interview ends, and Ilya hits replay, shoves a hand into his briefs. It's embarassingly fast: the orgasm hits like a train, hard and blinding, before the video finishes playing a second time.
He's still panting when Shane texts back. Next time, and then: Good night :) Love you.
An ocean away Shane is waking up. He'll put on his pads, his skates, his Team Canada jersey. He'll play the same beautiful hockey he's been playing since he was old enough to stand up, and it will be Ilya's name on his neck, pressing against skin. Keeping him safe.
This year, Ilya is going to win the Cup. He's going to win with the C on his chest, Raiders screaming in his ear, and that will be what he remembers when he asks for the trade. He'll walk away, even though it'll kill him, because the other side of this is Shane. Shane, and the slow yielding in him that has him thrusting his own head into a collar.
After the game, Ilya sends, call me. Shane, lit up with victory, is a beautiful thing. Ilya could spend a lifetime devouring him. Keep the neck guard on.
Personally I do think that sometimes non-hockey fans can end up mischaracterizing Shane and Ilya because they don't know enough about hockey/hockey playstyles
The Ilya we see in Heated rivalry would not be throwing the first punch, he's not an enforcer. Ilya is a star center and a Pest. He wouldn't be doing his job correctly if he was punching players every other game, it would end up with not enough ice time to let him be the playmaker he's paid to be.
But being a pest can be playmaking! Find a player to bait, emotionally push them just enough that they try to fight you, and then get the fuck out of there before the ref gives you both penalties. This gets your team the power play. There is probably someone on Ilya's line dedicated to helping him get out of the fights he starts, and finishing them for him!
I also think this is also something that Shane would respect. Ilya is good at it and it's a good strategy for his team. I don't think Shane would see it as some dirty tactic, because Shane probably thinks everyone with a brain can see it for what it is! He probably thinks everyone should be able to see that being an asshole is a tactic for Ilya, that it's something to ignore and not fall for, that it's a strategy and not personal beef.
I think Shane's more disappointed when a Metro falls for it. Shane sees it as Ilya set up a Looney Toons ass obvious trap and one of his teammates ran into it. Why be mad at Bugs Bunny when you can be mad at your defenceman for falling for a fucking Bugs Bunny trap.
‘Heated Rivalry,’ ‘Industry,’ and ‘Widow’s Bay’ Dominate the Prestigious 2026 TCA Award Nominations | Decider
Both Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams have received nominations in the hyper-competitive Individual Achievement in Drama Category.
Heated Rivalry received FIVE nominations at this years Television Critics Association Awards, including individual nominations for both stars, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams!! 💜
So Harris decides to do something special for the moms of the team for Mother's Day and lines up a series of posts to go live hourly throughout the day, wherein there is a featured picture of each player's mother wearing that player's jersey and a few extra pictures provided by that player's mom--pictures from Timbits games, family vacations through the years, holidays. A few players' moms actually provide Harris with pictures of themselves in the hospital holding the newborn who would someday become an Ottawa Centaur! Super cute! And if making these posts in alphabetical order by last name means that Harris gets to make sure that his own wonderful mother-in-law goes first, well...you didn't see anything.
It's just a day of cute posts, and Ilya keeps checking to see if Yuna's post has gone live because those baby Shane pictures always hit like crack and Shane so rarely lets his parents pull them out.
Delightfully, Yuna chose one of Ilya's favorites--a VERY nineties newborn photoshoot where Shane already has a shock of black hair sticking up in all directions, and a pinched little expression on his face. He is all cheek and eyebrow, and Yuna is twenty-four and has bangs and denim overalls, and it is so nineties.
"Yuna sent Harris the Sears photo," Ilya tells Shane, giddy.
"Oh great," Shane groans.
"People are saying you make the same face when you argue with ref."
"I don't argue with the refs," Shane mutters.
"True, you have very smart and sexy Captain husband to do this for you now."
Ilya scrolls through the rest of the pictures--not to be outdone, Yuna has provided more than most. Shane in the Metros onesie that Ilya knows he was brought home from the hospital in. Yuna holding a year-old Shane in her lap, her narrow frame nearly dwarfed by his chubby body. Yuna with little Shane at what is clearly a Centaurs game, circa 1995.
The next one--he sort of wasn't expecting, but he isn't completely surprised either. His own face, smiling politely next to Yuna and David the day he flew out to Ottawa to sign some paperwork for his contract with the Centaurs. It was only the second or third time he'd seen them without Shane, and maybe the first picture they'd taken together as well. He'd been carefully cropped out of previous ones.
"Oh, that's nice," Shane mumbles. He's stopped pretending he's not looking over Ilya's shoulder, watching him scroll.
The next picture is of their wedding day, unsurprisingly--one of several pictures from that day wherein Shane and Yuna had matching misty eyes and Ilya was actually just visibly crying with his face pressed to someone's shoulder.
Lastly, Yuna in her jersey--custom-made, Hollander-Rozanov on the back and 24|81 below. She's smiling over her shoulder at some game or other, proud of it.
Then there is one more picture. Yuna's hand in frame, holding a wallet-size picture of Irina Rozanova as she was thirty-two years ago, young and smiling with a baby Ilya pressed to her cheek.
It's one of only a few pictures that Ilya knows exist of his mother, and he thought the only copy was in a frame in the room he's currently sitting in.
"Why does Yuna have tiny picture of Mama?" Ilya murmurs.
"Oh." Shane rubs the back of his neck. "She, uh, she does this thing--she has pictures of all of us in her purse. It's, like, so that she has us with her. She asked me for Irina's picture a little while ago."
In the picture, Yuna is holding Irina's picture up next to the Jumbotron broadcasting Ilya's grinning face from the season intro video.
"Oh," Ilya murmurs. "That's..."
"If you think it's weird--"
"No," Ilya snaps. "Don't even finish that sentence, Hollander. I love it."
The caption of the post reads:
Yuna Hollander, mother of #24 and mother-in-love to #81! Mama Hollander is a reformed Metros fan and a proud Ottawan who can almost always be seen in the crowd at Canadian Tire Centre cheering on the home team. We love you and your boys, Yuna! Happy Mother's Day!
The Hollander-Rozanovs also treasure the memory of Irina Rozanova, mother to #81. Happy Mother's Day, Irina.
yall make ilya the treat dogdad, but you are wrong and here is why
shane is obviously not the animal lover of this household. his parents weren’t pet people (david has allergies), and he’s always been on the road too much to even consider it. plus, there’s so much hair and dirt and slobber and mess and it just feels unnecessary
but he sees how happy anya makes ilya, and that alone is enough to make him look past all the mess
it takes him a while to bond with her though. she and ilya are basically inseparable at home, and when shane is alone with her, she mostly keeps her distance, napping on the couch and lifting her head to stare at the door every once in a while, waiting for her papa to come home
but one long weekend while ilya is visiting boston, shane takes anya on a hike. that’s something you do with dogs, right? anya seems to love it, anyway. she noses at some leaves when they pause for water, and rolls around in the grass at the top of the hill happily, but otherwise is just as focused on her run as shane is. she keeps pace with him, her leash attached to shane’s waist, and she’s like his adorable little shadow. and shane kinda loves it, having this running partner who enjoys the fresh air and quiet with him
so when they get home, he makes sure she drinks water (but not too fast, he’s read about that) and fishes some treats out of the bag at the back of the closet
and they’re okay, he thinks. kinda boring for her, maybe? they almost look like kibble, which can’t be fun and enriching for her. she’s a hunting dog by breed, or at least has a little of that in her gene pool, so she must want something more prey-like?
so in the four days ilya is gone, shane goes ham researching enriching and delicious dog treats, and ends up at one of those obnoxiously expensive pet food places in town picking out refrigerated and freeze dried things that would probably gross ilya out
and while he’s there, the sales girl opens up his world even further. what kind of human food is okay for anya to eat. doggie cookies and pup cups and a universe of treats that of course anya deserves, look at her! just sitting at shane’s feet staring up at him, not reacting to the other dogs and sounds and smells, just bopping her head against his knee
so on the way home, back of the jeep loaded with a frankly obscene amount of purchases, including a number of toys, they go through the timmy’s drive through to get a black coffee and a pup cup
and when ilya returns, anya runs up to him at the door, bouncing and jumping and getting her little paws up on his chest
and then she turns back around and joins shane on the couch, where she’s got her bum pressed against his thigh and a very expensive enriched bone in her mouth (over a blanket, of course)
I fully believe that Shane and Ilya cannot agree on an anniversary. Shane says it was the All Stars weekend because that's when he thought they were both 100% serious about the relationship because that's when he was, Ilya says it was the cottage when they said "I love you'' because he didn't believe in it until that moment. They find this out the first year with Shane's anniversary date when Shane plans an elaborate secret date the last night of All Stars and gets Ilya gifts, and Ilya has no idea what its for. They agree to disagree on the date, "We will just celebrate twice a year, I guess." It happens again with their wedding anniversary, Shane says its when they legally got married, Ilya says it was when the twins married them because he doesnt care about about being officially married in the eyes of Canadian law he cares about the first time they said "I do". They find this out when a reporter asks them about their wedding and when they had it and they both gave different answers. Once again they agree to just celebrate twice a year. They say it is because the date doesn't really matter and both of them are right in some way, but in reality it is so they can compete on who plans the more romantic, thoughtful, and elaborate anniversary date. And so that they don't fight about who's planning the date this year or making conflicting plans by accident.
The Cens are in the locker room after a pretty light practice, the season not yet in full swing, and the topic turns to married life, as it often does.
Ilya and Shane mostly stay quiet, giving each other pointed looks when Bood and Wyatt swap stories about their fucking awesome wives. That is until…
“Yeah but like, Roz and Hollzy have the most ideal situation.”
There’s a mix of eyebrow raising and general murmurs of agreement, half of the team unsure if this is Holmberg’s way of coming out.
“What do you mean?” Shane asks, ever one to ignore a social rule.
“You spend all day together kicking ass and being the best at hockey, and then you get to go home together and be and love and shit but also still talk hockey.” Holmberg sighs and stares into his locker a little wistfully. “I wish I was gay so I could have a hockey husband.”
The team is quiet for a minute, some of the younger members nodding in sage agreement. Bood even looks like it’s an intriguing idea.
“Why don’t you date a PWHL player?”
Wyatt says it with it much fuss, shoving his pads into his bag unceremoniously. Holms, however, looks like he’s just been struck by lightning.
“Say that again.”
Wyatt turns to the kid, eyebrows raised like he’s confused by the reaction.
“You know that the PWHL exists, right?”
Holmsberg is too thunderstruck to scoff.
“Yeah. The Charge. They’re…oh my god.”
And thus starts the social media scrolling to figure out which Charge players are 1) single, 2) in Holms age range, and 3) into men
I think at some point Ilya’s therapist gets concerned by what seems to be a codependent and anxious attachment btw Ilya and Shane. When Shane the Doer hears about it, For the sake of his husband’s mental health’s improvement and the preservation of a healthy marriage, he convinces Ilya to try installing boundaries and do activities separately. It lasts a week before Ilya comes home sobbing from a video game session with Troy communicating that if they keep this boundary thing up he’ll need to switch his meds’ dosage because he’s miserable. Shane jumps from the couch he’s been sitting on for 40minutes because he was supposed to eat diner with rose but he kept wanting to make jokes and look at ilya to see him laugh but he wasn’t there and it SUCKED OMG and Shane starts sobbing too because if they keep this up he will have to get on his own meds and let’s never do this again I hate it when I can’t smell you near me
the idea that hollander "tamed" rozanov is really funny to shane because like. ilya finds it hot and is always going along with it, yes of course my husband is so sexy why do you think i moved to this boring fucking city. for dick. meanwhile shane knows the truth which is that ilya tamed himself. he herded shane like a sheepdog until he was exactly in the right position for ilya to flop down at his feet and say i love you, i am a one man guy, sleep with other people if you want but you are it for me, so shane is always there like ??? ilya. what are you talking about. i was literally prepared to be a secret slot on your roster for the rest of time without even admitting that i was gay until you decided to have me over make me lunch and say my name while you come like a love confession and ilya goes lyubmiyy. shut up. i was untamable you tamed the untamable and so shane has to be like yes, baby, i worked so hard, i used all my tricks but he's rolling his eyes because ilya wants to be a wolf shane coaxed inside to sleep on the hearth but instead he's a cat who snuck through the window and fell in love with his prey. self domesticated. and this is just one of the many perfect games they play
"For decades, wolf researchers believed ravens followed wolf packs to find food. Every biologist who flew aerial surveys over Yellowstone saw the same thing.
Wolves moving across the snow with ravens overhead, black shapes trailing the pack like a shadow with wings. The assumption was simple. The ravens were following the wolves. The wolves would kill. The ravens would eat. A study published in March 2026 using GPS transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens in Yellowstone proved the assumption wrong.
The ravens were not following the wolves. They were remembering where kills had happened before and flying over those locations looking for new carcasses. The relationship between the two species is real. The mechanism is not what anyone thought it was.
Bernd Heinrich, a University of Vermont biologist who spent years studying ravens in Maine and Yellowstone, first documented the scale of the association. His data showed ravens present near wolf packs 99.7 percent of the time during winter in Yellowstone. Not occasionally. Not frequently. Essentially always. On Isle Royale, researcher John Vucetich observed the same pattern from the air.
Every wolf pack had ravens with it. The birds were just always there.
The numbers at kill sites are staggering. The average number of ravens documented at a Yellowstone wolf kill is thirty. The maximum recorded at a single carcass is 135.
A wolf pack brings down an elk in the Lamar Valley, and within hours over a hundred ravens have materialized from across the drainage to feed. They do not wait politely. They land on the carcass while the wolves are still eating. They grab chunks of meat and cache them in the snow and in tree crotches for later retrieval. Research estimates that ravens can consume up to forty percent of a carcass, which means a wolf pack that kills a seven-hundred-pound elk may lose nearly three hundred pounds of it to birds.
That loss is so significant that one study proposed a theory that reshapes how we think about wolf pack size entirely. If a pair of wolves can take down an elk, why do wolves hunt in packs of four, six, eight, or more? The per-capita meat return decreases with every additional mouth. A pair gets the most meat per wolf. The answer may be ravens. Two wolves cannot eat fast enough to outpace a hundred ravens stripping the carcass simultaneously. A larger pack can post guards, feed in shifts, and physically dominate the carcass long enough to retain a greater share of the kill. Wolves may hunt in packs not because they need more teeth to bring down prey, but because they need more bodies to defend the kill from birds.
The ravens pay for their meals. Heinrich documented in his book Mind of the Raven that ravens serve as an early warning system at kill sites. Ravens are more vigilant than wolves. They perch in trees overlooking the carcass and scan the horizon in every direction. When a grizzly bear approaches, or a rival wolf pack, or a mountain lion, the ravens see it first. Their alarm calls alert the feeding wolves to the incoming threat before the wolves' own senses detect it. The wolves get airborne sentries. The ravens get an animal with the jaw strength to open a frozen elk carcass that no raven beak can penetrate.
That is the core of the mutualism. The raven cannot open the hide. The wolf can. The wolf cannot see a threat approaching from a mile away while its head is buried in a rib cage. The raven can. Each species fills a gap in the other's capability, and the result is a partnership so consistent that L. David Mech, the most published wolf researcher in the world, wrote that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other and that each is fully aware of the other's capabilities.
The play behavior is the part that makes biologists uncomfortable because it implies something beyond transactional mutualism. Wolves and ravens play together. Not at kill sites. Not during feeding. During downtime. Yellowstone observers have documented ravens diving at resting wolves, pulling their tails, and flying away. Wolf pups chase ravens across meadows. Ravens steal sticks from pups and hold them just out of reach. The interactions look like the cross-species equivalent of two bored kids messing with each other because there is nothing else to do.
Doug Smith, the retired lead biologist of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, had watched this relationship from the air for decades. Wolf researchers have believed forever that ravens follow wolves, he wrote after the 2026 study was published. Every wolf researcher has seen it. I have seen it routinely from the plane while wolves are chasing an elk in Yellowstone Park, numerous times. Ravens are just always there. This is an age-old observation. But it has never been rigorously tested until now.
The 2026 study, which used 2.5 years of GPS data from transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens simultaneously, revealed that ravens were not tracking wolf movements in real time. They were patrolling known kill sites. A raven that fed at a wolf kill in a specific drainage in November would return to that drainage repeatedly over the following weeks and months, flying over the exact location where the carcass had been, checking whether a new kill had appeared. The ravens were not following the wolves. They were following the memory of where wolves had killed before.
That distinction matters because it changes the raven from a passive follower into an active strategist. A bird that follows a wolf pack is reacting. A bird that memorizes kill locations across an entire landscape and patrols them systematically is planning. The raven is not tagging along. It is running a surveillance network across hundreds of square miles of Yellowstone, checking sites where food has appeared before, and showing up fast enough when it appears again that every observer since the 1995 reintroduction assumed it had been following the wolves the whole time.
The wolf and the raven share almost identical geographic range across the Northern Hemisphere. Everywhere wolves live, ravens live. The association is not a Yellowstone novelty. It is a continental relationship between two of the most intelligent species in North American wildlife, running continuously across boreal forest, tundra, mountain, and prairie, built on meat, memory, and a mutual awareness that neither species has ever needed to be taught."
Sources: Heinrich, B. "Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds." / Stahler, D. et al. (2002). Animal Behaviour. / Mech, L.D. "The Wolf: The Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species." / Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Living Bird, 2020. / Bozeman Daily Chronicle, March 2026.
