He doesn’t have the best players in the country, far from it. But they’re the most disciplined, and have received the best tactical training. They’ve been playing together all their lives. And they’ve got Kevin.

They rarely play beautifully. David believes in detailed strategy and a solid defense, but above all he believes in results. Even when the board and parents keep going on about “letting the players lose” and trying to play “more enjoyable hockey.” David doesn’t even know what “enjoyable hockey” is, he only knows one sort of hockey that isn’t enjoyable—the one where the opposing team scores more points. He’s never let anyone else influence him; he’s never given a place on the team to the son of a marketing manager at one of the big sponsors like he’s been told to. He’s uncompromising; he knows that’s not going to make him any friends, but he doesn’t care. Do you want to be liked? It’s easy: just get yourself to the top of the podium. So David does whatever it takes to get up there. That’s why he doesn’t see his team the same way everyone else does, because even if Kevin is the best player he isn’t always the most important.

The computer on the kitchen table is showing a game from earlier in the season, when an opposing player sets off after Kevin with the obvious intention of tackling him from behind, but the next moment is himself lying flat on the ice. Another Beartown player, number sixteen, is standing over him, already missing his gloves and helmet. A torrent of punches rains down on the opposing player.

Kevin might be the star, but Benjamin Ovich is the heart of the team. Because Benji is like David: he’s prepared to do whatever it takes. So ever since he was small, the coach has drummed one single idea into him: “Don’t pay any attention to what people say, Benji. They’ll like us well enough when we start winning.”

*

He’s seventeen years old, and his mom wakes him early by saying his full name. She’s the only person who uses it. “Benjamin.” Everyone else calls him Benji. He stays in bed, in the smallest room in the last row house at the far end of Beartown, just before the start of the Hollows, until she comes in for the third or fourth time. When words from her homeland creep into her exhortations he gets up, because that’s when it gets serious. His mom and Benji’s three older sisters only slip into the old language when they want to express great anger or eternal love, and this country simply doesn’t have sufficiently flexible grammar to express which good-for-nothing part of the laziest useless donkey Benji might be, or how they love him as deeply as ten thousand wells full of gold. His mom can get both elements into the same sentence. It’s a remarkable language in that sense.

She watches him as he cycles off. She hates having to force him out of bed before the sun has risen, but she knows that if she goes to work without driving her son out of the house he wouldn’t leave it at all. She’s a single mother with three daughters, but it’s this seventeen-year-old boy who worries her more than anything. A boy who cares too little about the future and frets too much about the past: nothing could depress a mother more. Her little Benjamin, the fighter with whom it’s far too easy for the girls of Beartown to fall in love. The boy with the most handsome face, the saddest eyes, and the wildest heart they’ve ever seen. His mom knows, because she married a man who looked just the same, and nothing but trouble lies ahead for men like that.

*

David is making coffee in his kitchen. He always brews an extra pot each morning and fills a thermos—the coffee at the rink is so bad you ought to be able to charge someone for assault just for offering it to you. His computer is playing a match from last year, in which Kevin is being pursued by a furious defender until Benji appears at full speed out of nowhere and hits the defender on the back of his neck with his stick, sending him flying headfirst into the opposing team’s bench. Half the team storms onto the ice to get revenge on Benji, who is standing there waiting for them without his helmet, fists clenched. It takes the referees ten minutes to get the fight under control. In the meantime Kevin has gone to sit down quietly on his own bench, unharmed and untroubled.

Some people try to make excuses for Benji’s temperament by blaming his tough childhood, the fact that his dad died when he was young. David never does that; he loves Benji’s temperament. Other people call him a “problem child,” but all the characteristics that make him a problem off the ice are what make him so special on it. If you send him into a brawl it doesn’t matter if serpents, trolls, and all the monsters of hell are in the way, Benji always comes out with the puck. If anyone gets anywhere near Kevin he’ll fight through concrete to place himself in the way, and that sort of thing can’t be taught. Everyone knows how good Kevin is—every youth-team coach on each of the top clubs in the country has tried to recruit him—and that also means that every team they play contains at least one psycho who wants to hurt him. So David doesn’t accept it when people say that Benji ends up “fighting” in every other match. He’s not fighting. He’s protecting the most important investment the town has ever seen.

But David has stopped using that particular word in front of his girlfriend: “investment.” Because, as she put it: “Is that really any way to talk about a seventeen-year-old?” David has learned not to try to explain it. Either you understand that aspect of hockey or you don’t.

*

On the road that links the row houses to the rest of the town, Benji stops his bicycle at the point where his mother can no longer see him and lights a joint. He lets the smoke fill him, feels the sweet calmness rise and fall. His long, thick hair stiffens in the wind, but the cold has never bothered him. He cycles everywhere, no matter what time of year it is. At practice, David often commends him on his calf muscles and sense of balance in front of the other players. Benji never replies, because he suspects that saying, “That’s what you get if you ride a bike through deep snow every day when you’re high as a kite” isn’t the answer the coach wants to hear.