#koroygi

Like imagine, you are two talented MLH players. You are in love. You have decided, together, bravely, to make A Statement. Not just a press release, but A Moment. For the culture. For every queer kid watching hockey. For history.

Vincent has been planning this for weeks. He’s going to score a hat trick (he’s a rookie of the year nominee, he’s good enough to just decide to do that shit) and then he’s going to rip off his jersey and show that he’s wearing a Koroygi jersey underneath. The crowd’s going to go wild. Sports media’s going to implode, everyone’s going to cry.

EXCEPT

It’s the same fucking day Shane Hollander gets into his first ever on-ice fight. With Scott Hunter. AFTER a game. Just hockey’s two Golden Boys throwing hands for reasons no one can fully explain. Of course ESPN loses its mind. And of course it’s like an hour before the Nomads are set to play.

So it’s back to the fucking drawing board.

And fine. Vincent’s a professional. He wants to give something important to queer fans who feel like they don’t belong. He and First Name can regroup. They’ll do it in the playoffs.

Now’s it’s 2017. Minnesota and Houston are both contenders for The Cup and it’s the perfect stage. The plan: when Vincent and First Name (obviously both centers) meet for the final face off, they’ll rip off their helmets and kiss right as the puck drops. It would be iconic! The SportsCenter thumbnail alone would win a GLAAD award!

EXCEPT

Just before the second intermission of the Nomads v Drillers game, everyone’s phones explode with alerts that Cliff Marlow fucking leveled Shane Hollander. Now the entire news cycle is “is Hollander okay” and “is Montreal’s cup run over” and “why wouldn’t Rozanov leave Hollander’s side on the ice” and “what does Rozanov’s face mean” and there are a million blurry screenshots of Rozanov looking devastated circulating on every platform.

And Vincent is standing at the bench in his helmet, mouth guard in, wanting to make history, and First Name is looking at him from the opposite bench and they both just know that The Moment is gone, absorbed into the black hole of Hollander and Rozanov content.

And what sucks so much is that Lemaire and Koroygi are good players! They have a genuine, beautiful, historic thing they’re trying to do. But their entire class of hockey exists in the shadow of these twice-in-a-generation talents who can’t stop generating headlines by accident that Vincent and First Name can’t generate on purpose.

It’s like trying to drop your debut album on the same day Beyonce surprise drops hers. It doesn’t matter how good your album is, you’re not getting any streams.

And then Scott Hunter comes out.

And Vincent like, okay, you know what? Good for him. Genuinely. At least it’s not Hollander and Rozanov stealing our thunder for once. The narrative has shifted. The door is open. Maybe now people will actually pay attention when—

And then Shane and Ilya get married.

Koroygi, the third pick in the 2009 MLH draft, and Vincent Lemaire, the third Rookie of the Year nominee in 2011, keep trying to make gay hockey history. The universe (and Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, specifically) keeps having other other plans.

A fic full of dumb jokes, a hopefully sweet love story, a moral about priorities that I’m still learning in my late twenties, and an answer the question nobody asked, but I’ve nonetheless chosen to obsess over: what if the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Heated Rivalry were boning?