Sid comes out. This is what happens next.

It’s 10 pm, and Sid is ready to scream.

Tyler winked at him. "Hey, want me to act all demure and nervous about it? That could be fun." The mind boggled. "No," Jamie said firmly.

In retrospect, Jordie realizes Jamie’s coming out might have been a much bigger deal to him than Jordie had let him make it. Jamie is trans. Jordie doesn't care, and he will murder everyone that does. (POV Jordie)

Tyler gets traded to Dallas on a Thursday.

Geno's a dom and only a dom, Sidney's a sub who doms sometimes but only because people keep asking her nicely, and all their feelings for each other are entirely platonic. Yeah right.

“We were playing a pickup game on a rink in my hometown and I high sticked him in the face and knocked his front tooth out. I thought he was going to be so angry but he looked at me like he wanted to hold out his bloody tooth to me and propose.”

Sid's hair is a thing. It's her thing, and she's always a girl even when she's a hockey player.

There are a lot of things Sydney doesn't say. Sasha hears them all anyway.

Sidney Crosby comes away from Worlds with a gold medal and a soul bond. He had to fight to win one and he's ready to fight to keep the other.

It must happen during the Stanley Cup locker room celebration. Sid walks in, and sweeps the Cup up over his head amongst an eruption of champagne spray. Sid is so brilliantly, incandescently happy that he doesn’t even notice that not all the joy he feels is his own.

"What are you saying?" Johnny says slowly, because this sounds like she's trying to pick him up, which is impossible, because if Kaner has one concrete rule, it's ‘anyone but teammates.’ "We can help each other out here," Kaner suggests, crossing her legs in her too-short skirt. "That's all. Two friends helping each other out in a dry spell. You're free to do whatever. It wouldn't be a big deal."

“Are you?” Taylor asks unexpectedly. “Am I what?” Looking up from the stove, Sid finds her watching him with an odd look on her face. “Happy.” It should be an easy question to answer.

The locker room chatter started up almost at once, providing a screen of background noise. Zhenya sat down beside the ghost. “I’m captain. Evgeni Malkin.” “Sidney Crosby,” the ghost said. He didn’t offer his hand, which made Zhenya think he had been dead for a while, long enough to shed the ingrained habits of the living. “I’m, uh. Is it really 2018?”

Sidney wants to lose his virginity. Geno helps.

“Hello.” Zhenya looks up, and there’s a small boy on the other side of the counter. He smiles so wide that Zhenya can easily tell that he’s missing one of his two front teeth—kind of like Sasha but more adorable—and he’s got dimples in his round cheeks. In which Geno is a chocolatier and Sid really loves the truffles his son keeps buying for him.

Lots of people watch Geno. Like most people, really, at least let their eyes linger for a few seconds. For starters, he’s six foot three with a penchant for thick-soled combat boots and carefully sculpted hair arrangements that together can easily add 5 inches to his overall height. Then there’s the eyebrow ring, the purple streak through his dark hair, the smudged eyeliner, and typically, the tightest pants Geno can pour his fabulous if-he-does-say-so-himself ass into. All of those would be enough, any given day, to make people stop and stare. But today he’s also the guy most of North America watched in Prime Time last night, kicking ass and taking names as he as he swiped the Men’s Singles Gold from the clutches of that whiny fucking sore loser, Plushenko. So. Yeah, lots of people are watching him, but Sidney Crosby is not lots of people. He’s Sidney fucking Crosby.

The naiad moved in shortly after Sid finished his house, that first summer, a week after he filled the pool. He noticed some splashing one morning while he was eating breakfast, and when he went outside to investigate, she popped her head up out of the water, clung to the side of the pool, and hissed at him. “Uh,” Sid said, still holding a slice of toast in one hand. Dew from the grass chilled his bare feet. “Are you—hi?”

Jordie is a totally supportive brother, which is why he's hiring Jamie a stripper.

Jack thought his first year in the NHL would be 100% about hockey, but the reality is so much more complicated. (AU where the Goodbye for the Summer comics didn’t happen, because I had already written 80K words of this. But just because it’s canon doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy long, angsty, get-together stories, amirite?) Alternate summary, courtesy of Dracavia: What if Bad Bob didn't say anything at graduation?

Kent Parson comes out and it's a bit of a train wreck, but not for the reasons you might think.

Bitty is in Annie’s, bent over his textbooks and wondering, not for the first time, why he decided to take French as a language (oh yes, it’s because so many old recipes are written in French, he’s going abroad there to study food history, can’t wait for the summer; half of fall and then winter semester until he goes, but that doesn’t help him now does it) , when he hears someone clear their throat. “Excuse me, is this seat taken?” Oh boy. Eric doesn’t even bother lifting up his head. “Sorry, not a girl and not interested.”

Travis goes into heat while in the bubble. The only problem is that Patty is 2000 kilometers away.

There was an empty bed, a bassinet, and a recliner. There was a sink, a window overlooking the city, and a small table. But none of those things registered because Nicky was standing in the middle of the room shirtless, with the tiniest baby Alex had ever seen cradled to his chest as he swayed. ———— Nicky adopts a baby and Alex falls in love.

The ESPN hockey anchors take a cheap shot. Bitty takes one back.

When Dan Erikson is assigned to write an article about Jack Zimmermann's years in college, he thinks he knows what he's getting into. Then he meets Professor Simpson, Jack's photography professor. [also known as: Good Guy Reporter Dan Erikson]

Jack looks at her and then puts her luggage down and leans in, grabs her into a full-body hug, right there on the sidewalk, holding her so close. She can’t remember when he last hugged her this hard. “He told his parents. About being gay. About us,” he says into her shoulder. “They were awful.”

Taylor loves it, everyone watching while he fucks himself on Adam’s dick and Adam’s hands are tight on his hips while he tells Taylor how good he looks, how everyone wants to be where Adam is. He loved it back in juniors and it’s even better now.

Geno is too injured to go to the 2017 All-Star Game, which would be bad enough if that wasn't also the weekend of Sidney's scheduled heat. Luckily, Alex Ovechkin is more than willing to help Sid through it.

A bracelet doesn't need to mean much, really.

The grainy cellphone photo on the cover of the magazine is of his own back, his red Samwell t-shirt. He's got a forearm braced on the wall, his other hand holding the face of someone small and blond, mostly blocked from view, who has his hands on Jack's chest and a blue hoodie tied around his waist. Emblazoned across the bottom of the cover are the words IS JACK ZIMMERMANN GAY? and it feels like someone just punched him in the stomach.

Soft hockey boys just trying to make it work.

Nicky wanted a family. He wanted a family very much, but not like this.

It hits him like a goddamn bus right after his and Crosby’s power play goal puts Canada up 5-0. Not the heat itself—that’s little more than a prickle under his skin—but the knowledge that one’s coming. Here. In Prague.

It was embarrassing, but Tom only realized he was in rut well into the last week of January. It was Thursday, and he was in Starbucks because Mike had mentioned, off-hand, that he was a little bit tired and needed some caffeine. Tom got to the front of the line, made eye contact with the pretty omega boy behind the register, and barely caught his drool with his own hand.

Landy is shaking his head next to him as he applies the scent blocker to his own upper lip. "I thought you guys were friends -- you've never smelled his heat pheromones before?" "What? I was friends with who?" Landy smacks Nate upside the head. "Crosby," he says, like it should be the most obvious thing in the world. Nate looks back out at the ice, where Sid is taking a faceoff, a bead of sweat dripping down his face. "Holy shit," he mutters.

“Guys?” Tom asks, yawning, as he pokes his head into the den. “Whoa! Whoa, okay,” he says. “I—” Andre laughs, loud, easy, so Tom doesn’t think he needs to run. “Stay,” he says, giving a lazy wave to the couch.

It coalesces somewhere around hour two, and then it’s suddenly, inescapably, achingly obvious. He takes a deep breath and realizes he’s just really, really horny. What the ever-living hell? -- Wherein curses are real, pride comes before a fall, and PK and Carey have to cope with a little more magic than anyone expected.

Andre just short-circuits people’s normal boundaries. Alex has even put down the Wales trophy.

Alex twists the ring around his finger as he watches Nick pace. He consented, everyone did, but in the privacy of their room, he seems much more on edge now about it. “Nicky,” he finally whines, sick of watching. Despite all his pacing, Nicky’s face is blank and Alex has no idea what he’s thinking. Nicky spins to face him. “I don’t want this.”

Miro hasn't even gotten a chance to meet Roman properly yet, since he only got to the team the day before, and now management is essentially assigning them to... fuck. Management is assigning them to fuck. The thought rings loud and clear in his head as he finally shakes Jim's hand and leaves the office. He can't remember the rest of the conversation, no matter how hard he tries. His brain is still stuck on management assigning him a fuckbuddy.

A hockey rookie joins the campus drag troupe. Sasha didn’t know they even had a campus drag troupe. Sasha hasn’t been paying a lot of attention.

Sometimes, when a player is having relationship trouble of some kind, he wakes up in bed with a retired player who wore the same number. In theory, the retired player gives some advice.

"It can't get any worse," said Nicklas Backstrom in an interview before the first round of the 2018 playoffs. He should have known to be careful of the jinx something like that could bring, but now it's there, and Nicke and the team are determined to get rid of it by any means necessary.

Beau was willing to bet that a lot of people's weird superstitions started out like his. Something that had been a dumb bet or stupid competition in college or Juniors, but then fuck if they didn't score that night. So it became a thing, and since enough of them have weird fucking things they'd rather not get chirped about, it just becomes normal. All that said, Beau probably could have braced himself a little better for the inevitable, which was Flower pausing in his rapid-fire and unintelligible conversation with Tanger to grin like the cat that had caught the canary and ask, in the most delighted tone possible, "Sunshine, are you wearing panties?"

The first time Nicke sees a mature pair of player wings in person—not pre-downs, not rookie wings, but a full wingspan—it's the April before the draft, and he's in a dressing room in Latvia, trying not to be star-struck by his own teammates. Or: The NHL gives you wings.

“You,” Alex says, pointing at him. “Me,” he continues, pointing back at himself. “Married.” “Oh,” Nicky says. “Oh.” [It doesn't go any smoother after that.]

When your love for someone or something changes, you get love fever. When you get love fever, you usually get a love rash: a nasty, persistent itch in the shape of flowers or birds or your lover's hands. Alex has always noticed that Nicky doesn't get love blisters, just like he's noticed how Nicky fumes after losses, and prefers lasagna to ziti, and likes his girlfriends to cut his hair. He just assumed Nicky was one of those lucky people, the ones who don't get the rash.

Nicky generally considers himself a fairly competent, attentive person, so the fact that it’s taken him years to figure out that Alex has been essentially dating him is...disappointing. And also exhilarating.

Nicky scores a hat trick, and gets an orgasm. Or three.