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.

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.

"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." 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