GOOD WORK, YOUNG HAWK, the oak tree outside his building booms once the season’s over, and Patrick smiles sleepily in its direction. He's never been sure how the trees of Chicago know about hockey—trees hear a lot, but it's not like he's ever stopped in a public park to ask one about it.

There's a curse mark on the back of Sidney's neck.

“Patrick,” Jonny cuts in. He’s breathing too hard. “You’re not supposed to touch me because I hurt people. My touch. It hurts people.” “Well, you didn’t hurt me,” Patrick says, flopping onto the bed.

He saw the horn poking out from the pony's head, golden and straight and somehow delicate-looking despite the empty tuna can hanging off of it. The unicorn horn. "The fuck," Sidney said out loud, his eye skipping from the horn over the greyish-white body to the graceful gold-toned hooves.

Turning to a witch to save a loved one's life is one of the riskier gambles a person can take, but it's one that's arguably noble and brave. Falling in love with the witch, though—now that's just foolish.

The Penguins call him in early when it turns out that Evgeni Malkin is coming over from Russia - or maybe ‘fleeing’ is a better word for it. “Metallurg had his passport,” Therrien says over the phone. “And when they had to give it back so he could travel with the team, it’s likely that they took - ah, other precautions.” Magical precautions, he means. They’re practically sanctioned in the Superleague these days, though it’s not like North American hockey has any room to point fingers. Sid grew up a Habs fan; he knows from curses.

Magnitogorsk is a city of iron, and so is Metallurg’s will. They will not be thwarted, they do not let go of what is theirs. So when one of their own, born, bred, and molded, tries to run? To spit in the face of all that they’ve given him? Metallurg does not give up what it owns.

Geno ends up with red, white and blue hair after the Caps game, so he’s the first person sent to the new cursebreaker when they make it back to Pittsburgh. Sid is in the lounge when Geno comes back out. “I’m know her,” Geno says despondently. “She’s cursebreaker on staff for media at Sochi.”

The procedure was an unmitigated success. A healthy baby boy, perfectly average in height and weight with a heart that beat steady as a metronome.

The magic hits him as soon as he opens his car door. Hearth magic and earth magic and hedge magic, and probably more, all swirling in a cacophony that should have been overwhelming. But instead it feels like wading into…home.

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?”

“So,” the first reporter asks, pushing forward in the scrum, “did you know about Alex Ovechkin?”

"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.

Being a star athlete changes you.

"Being a star athlete changes you." And just when you think you're done, you become the face of an expansion team. Playing a winter sport in a desert. OR A (Dragon)Flower in the Desert

“Does it hurt?” Conor asked quietly. And, shit, now he had to look. Scott forced his gaze down and saw them—spurs of bone splitting his knuckles. It wasn’t just swelling from the few punches he’d thrown. That was bone. This was happening.

Bitty knew about the hockey gods, of course. But he didn’t exactly believe in them. Hockey players could be quite superstitious indeed, making their own rituals in routines. Now he’s on a pro team. He’s in the big show. The Schooners have made the playoffs. And playoffs…are a different creature altogether. For even if you don’t really believe in the hockey gods... ...they believe in you.

“Why can’t I just use your witch?” whines Connor, head resting on the kitchen table while Hallsy shuffles through a manila folder labeled “curse shit.” “She just rubbed foxglove on my wrists and told me not to have sex,” says Hallsy. “It was not very helpful, and also did you know that foxglove is poisonous?” “Yeah, if you eat it,” says Connor.

On June 26, 2015, Connor McDavid is drafted to the Edmonton Oilers. A few days later, he finds out that his new team is cursed. Things get complicated after that.

Mitch’s heart is freezing over. It takes him exactly one year, seventeen days, five hours, and thirteen minutes to notice.