Peter is sitting on a bench in the juniors’ empty locker room. One of the posters with a quote meant to inspire has fallen to the floor; it’s crumpled and marked with footprints. Peter reads it over and over again. He can remember when Sune pinned it up. Peter had only just learned to read.

He had been a child heading straight into darkness when hockey found him. Sune dragged him to the surface and this team kept him afloat. With a mom who died when he was in primary school and a dad who was always teetering on the brink between happy drunk and cruel alcoholic, when Peter as a little boy found something to cling on to, he held on until his knuckles turned white. Sune was always there, through the wins and the losses, in Beartown and on the other side of the world. When the injuries piled up and his career came to an abrupt halt, when Peter buried his father and his son within the space of a year—it was Sune who called him then and told him there was a club here that needed help. And Peter needed to feel that he could keep something alive.

He knows how quiet it gets when hockey tells you you’re finished. How quickly you start to miss the ice, the locker room, the guys, the bus trips, the gas-station sandwiches. He knows how as a seventeen-year-old he would look at the tragic former players in their forties who used to hang around the rink going on about their own achievements in front of an audience that got smaller and smaller each season. The job of GM gave him a chance to live on as part of a team, to build something bigger, something that could outlast him. But with that came responsibility: make the difficult decisions, live with the pain.

He picks up the poster that’s fallen to the floor. Reads it one last time. A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.

Today he will persuade the man who dragged him to the surface to resign of his own free will. The sponsors and the board don’t even want to fire Sune, they don’t want to give him a redundancy pay-off. Peter is expected to tell him to leave in silence, because that would be best for the club.

*

Sune wakes early in the little row house where he’s always lived on his own. He rarely has visitors, but those who do come are often surprised by how tidy it is. No piles of clutter, newspapers, beer cans, and pizza boxes as some people might expect of an old man who has been a bachelor all his life. Neat, tidy, clean. Not even any hockey posters on the walls or trophies on the shelves. Sune has never been very fond of objects; he has his plants in the windows and during the summer recess he grows flowers in the narrow garden at the back. And the rest of the time he has hockey.

He drinks his instant coffee and washes the cup straight afterward. He was once asked what the most important requirement was if you wanted to become a successful hockey coach. He replied: “Being able to drink really bad coffee.” All those early mornings and late nights in rinks with scorched coffeepots and cheap coffee machines, bus trips and isolated roadside cafés, camps and tournaments with school refectories—how could anyone with an expensive espresso machine at home ever put up with that? You want to be a hockey coach? Get used to not having the things other people have. Free time, a family life, decent coffee. Only the toughest of men can handle this sport. Men who can drink terrible coffee cold, if need be.

He walks through the town. Says hello to almost all the men over thirty; at some point over the years he’s coached pretty much every single one of them. The teenagers are a different matter altogether, because each year he recognizes fewer and fewer of them. He no longer shares a language with the boys in this town, which makes him as obsolete as a fax machine. He doesn’t actually understand how he’s expected to believe that “children are the future” when more and more of them are choosing not to play hockey. How can you be a child and not want to play hockey?

He takes the road leading up through the forest, and when he reaches the turning to the kennels he sees Benjamin. The boy stubs his cigarette out too late to avoid being seen, but Sune pretends not to have noticed. When he himself was a player his teammates used to smoke in the breaks between periods, and some of them would drink export-strength beer. Times change, but he isn’t sure that the game has actually changed quite as much as some coaches think.

He stops by the fence and looks at the dogs rushing about. The long-haired boy stands beside him, uncomprehendingly, but doesn’t ask what he’s doing there. Sune pats him lightly on his shoulder.

“Fantastic game on Saturday, Benjamin. Fantastic game.”

Benji looks down at the ground and nods silently. Sune doesn’t know if it’s shyness or humility, so the old man points through the fence and adds:

“You know, when David first became a coach I always used to say to him that the best hockey players are like the best hunting dogs. They’re born egotists; they always hunt for their own sake. So you need to nurture them and train them and love them until they start hunting for your sake too. For their teammates’ sake. Only then can they become really good. Truly great.”

Benji brushes his bangs from his eyes.

“Are you thinking of getting one, then?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for years. But I always thought I didn’t have time for a puppy.”

Benji puts his hands in his jacket pockets and stamps some snow from his shoes.

“And now?”

Sune starts laughing.

“I have a feeling that I might have a bit more free time than I’m used to fairly soon.” Benji nods and looks him in the eye for the first time in the conversation.

“Just because we love David doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have played for you.”

“I know,” the old man replies, and pats the boy on the shoulder again.

Sune doesn’t say what he’s thinking, because he isn’t sure if it would actually do Benjamin any favors. But the whole time David and Sune have been arguing about whether a seventeen-year-old could be ready to play in the A-team, they’ve really always been in total agreement. Just not about which of the seventeen-year-olds it should be. Kevin may have the natural talent, but Benjamin has all the rest. Sune has always been more interested in the length of the string than the size of the balloon.

Adri comes out of the house, ruffles her little brother’s hair, and shakes Sune’s hand.

“I’m Sune,” he says.

“I know who you are,” Adri replies, then asks immediately: “What do you think about next season? Have we got a chance of going up? You need to get a couple of decent skaters into that team, surely? Get rid of the donkeys in the second and third lines.”