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.
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