Bobo packs his bag. When he walks out of the door, Hog expects the other children to beg and plead to be allowed to go, too. But they don’t. Instead they stand on the steps with their hockey sticks and a tennis ball and ask, “Do you want to play, Dad?”

* * *

So Hog watches his eldest son go off to his first A-team game, and then he plays hockey with his two younger children in the garage. They struggle and sweat and chase the ball for hours. As if it were the only thing that mattered. Because it is, at that moment. And that’s the whole point.

* * *

What would you do for your family?

* * *

Peter Andersson goes from room to room in the house before he sets out from home. Kira is sitting in the kitchen with her laptop and a glass of wine.

“Do you want to come to the game?” he asks without much hope.

“I need to work,” she replies, predictably.

They look into each other’s eyes. At least they do that. He moves on and knocks on the door to Maya’s room. “Do you . . . I . . . I’m going to the game now,” he whispers.

“I have to study, Dad. Good luck!” she calls from the other side of the door.

Mother and daughter say that because it makes things easier for him. They’re giving him a chance to pretend that everything’s fine. He knocks on Leo’s door, too, but Leo isn’t home. He’s already gone to Hed. He’s planning to watch the game from the standing area.

* * *

Peter knows he should stop him. Punish his son. But how do you do that when all you’ve ever done is nag your son to go to hockey games with you?

* * *

Ana is standing in front of the mirror trying to choose an outfit. She has no idea how she ought to look. She’s been to a thousand hockey games but never one where Vidar has been playing. It’s a stupid fantasy, but she wants him to turn toward the stands and catch sight of her. And realize that she’s there for his sake.

Her dad is stumbling about in the kitchen downstairs. He knocks something over, then something else. She hears him swear. It aches so deeply in her, all his drinking. She throws on some clothes without picking them as carefully as she planned, because she wants to be out of the house before her dad gets so drunk that he needs help. She doesn’t want to let the bad version of him steal this game from her. Not today.

He calls out to her when she reaches the door, and her first thought is to pretend she hasn’t heard him, but something in his voice brings her up short. It’s too clear, too steady—it’s unusual. She turns around. Her dad has showered and combed his hair and is wearing a clean shirt. The kitchen behind him has been tidied up. There are bottles in the recycling bin, and he’s tipped their contents down the sink.

“Have a good time at the game. Do you need any money?” he asks tentatively.

She looks at her good dad for a long time. The bad one seems so far away right now. “How are you feeling?” she whispers.

“I want to try again,” he whispers back.

He’s said that before. It doesn’t stop her believing him. She hesitates for just a moment, then says, “Do you feel like going for a walk?”

“Aren’t you going to the game?”

“I’d rather go for a walk with you, Dad.”

* * *

So that’s what they do. While two whole towns head to a hockey game, a father and his daughter go for a walk in the forest that has always been theirs. Him, her, and the trees. A family.

* * *

Bobo cycles through Beartown carrying an invisible backpack of stone. He arrives late at the pickup spot, but no one seems to care, and Zackell hardly seems to notice that he’s turned up. Amat sits next to Bobo on the team bus to Hed but doesn’t know what to say. So they say nothing.

The parking lot in front of Hed’s ice rink is full of people, and there are lines even though there’s still a long time before the game starts. The rink is going to be full, the towns are in an uproar, the hate has had plenty of time to grow. This is going to be war. The bus is silent. All the players are wrestling with their own demons.

Only when the A-team members have gotten off the bus and gone into the hall, along the corridor, and into the locker room and are all sitting down does one of the older players get to his feet. He walks over to Bobo with a roll of tape in his hand.

“What was your mom’s name?” the older player asks.

Bobo looks up in surprise. Swallows hard. “My mom? Ann . . . Ann-Katrin. Her name is . . . her name was . . . Ann-Katrin.”

“With a ‘K’ or a ‘C’?” the older player asks.

“?‘K,’?” Bobo whispers.

The older player writes “Ann-Katrin” on a strip of tape. He sticks it onto the sleeve of Bobo’s jersey. Then he repeats the process and fastens the tape onto his own sleeve. The roll of tape passes silently around the locker room. Bobo’s mom’s name is on every arm.

* * *

Amat skates out onto the ice. As he’s done throughout his childhood, he starts skating around, around, around, to warm up. Normally he doesn’t hear anything, he’s gotten good at that, no matter how many people are in the rink. Everything becomes background noise, and he disappears into a zone of concentration that makes whoever is at the other end of the boards irrelevant. But today is different. Something breaks through the noise and yelling: his name. A few people somewhere are chanting it. Louder and louder. Over and over again. Until Amat looks up. Then the cheering gets louder.

In one corner, right at the top, stands a group of idiots jumping on their seats. They’re not there to cheer for either of the teams, they’re there for one single player. Because he’s from the Hollow. They’re singing the simplest, most beautiful, most important thing: “AMAT! ONE OF US! AMAT! ONE OF US! AAAMAT! ONE OF US!”

* * *

Fatima arrives at the rink in Hed on her own, but she’s holding two tickets. She watches the game with an empty seat beside her, Ann-Katrin’s. When Amat comes out onto the ice, she stands up and cheers, and when Bobo comes out, she cheers twice as loudly. She’ll do that at every game Bobo plays and every game his younger siblings play. No matter where their lives take them, there’ll always be a crazy woman in the stands cheering loud enough for two.

* * *

Why does anyone love team sports? Because we want to be part of a group? For some people the answer is simply that a team is a family. For anyone who needs an extra one or never had one in the first place.

* * *

Vidar Rinnius loved playing hockey when he was a child, just like every other kid. But unlike all the other kids, he loved the stands even more. He always promised himself that if he ever had to choose, he’d never pick the ice over the standing area. He said that to Teemu when he was little, and Teemu smiled and said, “It’s our club, remember that. When all the players have switched clubs, when the general managers and coaches have moved on to clubs that pay more, when the sponsors let us down and the politicians have sold out, we’ll still be here. And we’ll be singing even louder. Because it was never their club anyway. It’s always been ours.”

Vidar sat on the team bus today, his gear is in the locker room, but he isn’t there. He puts on a black jacket and goes up to the standing area instead, takes his place beside his brother and yells, “WE ARE THE BEARS! WE ARE THE BEARS! WE ARE THE BEARS! THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!”

Teemu looks at him. Perhaps he wants to tell his little brother to go back to the locker room, that a better life awaits him on the ice. But the Pack is their family, and the club belongs to them. So he kisses his brother’s hair. Woody and Spider hug Vidar, their fists clenched behind his back. And they sing, louder, more insistently:

“We are the bears! We are the bears!”

* * *

Love and hate. Joy and sorrow. Anger and forgiveness. Sports carry the promise that we can have everything tonight. Only sports can do that.

* * *

At one end of the rink, the Hed fans’ standing area, the volume rises until nothing can penetrate the wall of noise. Their chanting is laced with schadenfreude. If you ask most people in the stand afterward, several years from now, they’ll just give an embarrassed cough and mumble, “It’s just hockey . . . no harm intended . . . just something you sing in the heat of battle. You know what it’s like! It’s just hockey!” Of course it is. We support our team, you support yours, and we exploit every little weakness we can find. If we get a chance to hit below the belt, we grab it, anything to hurt you, get you off balance. Because we only want the same thing you do: to win. So the fans in Hed’s stands chant the simplest, cruelest, and vilest things they can think of.