I stared at him. "I already did four."
"I know." The sympathy in his voice wasn't encouraging.
Twenty minutes later, I found myself standing beneath bright lights, answering variations of the same questions I'd been hearing since yesterday.
How are you feeling?
What has the response been like?
Have your teammates been supportive?
What message do you hope this sends?
Most of the reporters were professional. Most were respectful. A few even seemed genuinely interested in having a conversation rather than collecting a quote. Others were hunting for something more dramatic. One reporter asked whether I was worried about losing endorsements. Another wanted to know if I thought my announcement would affect ticket sales.
One of them somehow turned a question about hockey into a question about my dating life. "Thane, are you seeing anyone?"
I got a couple more questions: "Was there a specific person who inspired your announcement?" and "Do you have a message for young LGBTQ athletes?"
I answered what I could.
Deflected what I couldn't.
Repeated myself more times than I could count.
By the end of it, I felt less like a hockey player and more like a public relations campaign wearing a suit. For years I'd imagined what would happen if the truth became public. I'd worried about teammates. Sponsors. Fans. The league.
What I hadn't anticipated was how exhausting it would be to have complete strangers suddenly feel entitled to pieces of my life that had never belonged to them.
ELEVEN
THANE
I hated my phone. The damn thing hadn’t stopped vibrating since yesterday’s press conference.
I settled onto a bench near the back of the players' lounge and rubbed a hand across my face. The arena had finally started to quiet down. Most of the team had already left, and the remaining staff moved through the halls with the weary efficiency that followed every home game.
For the first time all day, nobody seemed to need anything from me. I unlocked my phone again and continued scrolling. It wasn’t long before a familiar name caught my eye.
noah_jensen1709.
My thumb stopped moving. For a moment, I simply stared at the screen.
Months ago, his message had arrived on a random Tuesday evening. At the time, it had looked like hundreds of other messages sent by hockey fans. Then I had opened it and spent the next week thinking about it.
And the next week.
And the week after that.
I opened the conversation.
The original message was still there.
A seventeen-year-old hockey player. A defenseman from Minnesota. He loved the game. He dreamed about college hockey and maybe, if everything broke right, something beyond that. Mixed in with all that hope had been a fear he clearly hadn't known where else to put.
He'd written that he was gay.
He'd written that he wasn't sure there would ever be a place for someone like him in professional hockey. The final line hit me just as hard now as it had the first time.
