“Calm down now, sweet cheeks,” Benji says with a smile, and is quite convinced that she’s going to punch him.

“SAY THAT AGAIN! SAY THAT ONE MORE TIME AND I SWEAR YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO PLAY IN THAT GAME!” she roars at him with her hand raised.

The headmaster lets out an anxious yelp and flies up from his chair, takes her by the arm, and leads her out into the corridor. Perhaps grabbing someone’s arm is the correct response. But both Benji and the teacher know that it should have been Benji’s.

*

In a classroom farther down the corridor Bobo slips off his desk and tumbles to the floor, still bare-chested and in the middle of “the bears from BEART . . .” There are two types of seventeen-year-olds around him: those who like hockey, and those who hate it. The ones who are terrified that he’s hurt himself, and those who hope he has.

11

A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.

*

Lars has no leadership style. He just yells. Amat has had him as his coach throughout his time on the boys’ team, and there are few things that worry him more than David being given the job of coaching the A-team next season, so that Lars ends up in charge of the junior team just as Amat gets there. Two more years with this man is more than he could handle, even for the sake of hockey. Lars has no grasp of tactics or technique, he just thinks everything is warfare. His only pep talk is bellowing that they “have to win the battle for the fortress!” and that they mustn’t “get fucked up the ass!” If the fifteen-year-olds had been clutching axes in their hands instead of hockey sticks, he would have coached them in exactly the same way.

Obviously it’s much worse for the others on the team. You can get away with a lot when you’re the best, and that’s what Amat has become this season. Zacharias has had to suffer one of Lars’s patented saliva-fountains as he yells: “Are the scars from your sex-change itching, Zach?” but Amat has sailed through. When he thinks about how close he came to giving up completely twelve months ago, he isn’t sure if he should feel happy that he carried on, or aghast at how close he came to not doing so.

He was tired, that’s all he can remember. Tired of fighting, tired of everyone shouting at him, tired of dealing with so much crap and abuse, tired of the locker room, where the juniors snuck in during one training session to cut up his shoes and throw his clothes in the shower. Tired of trying to prove he was more than the things they called him: a zero from the Hollow. The cleaner’s son. Too small. Too weak.

One evening after training he went home and didn’t get out of bed for four days. His mom very patiently left him alone. Only on the fifth morning did she open his door, ready to go to work, and say:

“You might be playing with bears. But that doesn’t mean you have to forget that you’re a lion.”

When she kissed him on the forehead and put her hand on his heart, he whispered:

“It’s too hard, Mom.”

“Your dad would have been so proud if he could have seen you play.”

“Dad probably didn’t even know what hockey was,” he mumbled.

“That’s why!” she replied in a raised voice, and she was a woman who took great pride in the fact that she never raised her voice.

She’d managed to clean the stands and the corridor and office, and had reached the locker room that morning when the caretaker walked past and knocked gently on the doorframe. When she looked up he nodded toward the ice and smiled. Amat had put down his gloves, hat, and jacket between the lines. That was the morning the boy realized that the only way to become better than the bears at their own game was to stop playing it their way.

*

David is sitting at the top of the stands. Now thirty-two, he’s spent more of that time inside rinks than outside them. When David became a coach, Sune forced him to watch every A-team game for an entire season from up here in the nosebleed seats, and now it’s a habit he can’t shake. Hockey looks different from up here, and the truth is that Sune and David always saw eye to eye about the questions, they just didn’t agree on the answers. Sune wanted to keep all the players in their own age group as long as possible, so that they would have time to work on their weaknesses and form rounded, focused teams without any shortcomings. David thought that attitude only led to the creation of teams where no one was exceptional. Sune believed that a player who was allowed to play with older players would only play to his strengths, and David agreed—he just couldn’t see the problem with that. He didn’t want a whole troupe of players who were all pretty good at exactly the same things, he wanted specialists.

Sune was like Beartown: a firm adherent of the old faith that no tree should grow too tall, naively convinced that hard work was enough. That’s why the club has collapsed at the same rate that unemployment in the town has rocketed. Good workers aren’t enough on their own, someone needs to have big ideas as well. Collectives only work if they’re built around stars.

There are plenty of men in this club who think that everything in hockey “should be the way it’s always been.” Whenever he hears that, David feels like rolling himself up in a carpet and screaming until his vocal cords give out. As if hockey has ever been constant! When it was invented you weren’t even allowed to pass the puck forward, and two generations ago everyone played without a helmet. Hockey is like every other living organism: it has to adapt and evolve, or else it will die.

David can no longer remember how many years he has been arguing about this with Sune, but on the evenings when he gets home in his very blackest mood his girlfriend usually teases him, asking if he’s “fallen out with daddy again?” It was quite funny to start with. Sune was more than just a coach when David himself became one, he was a role model. The end of a hockey player’s career is an endless series of doors closing with you on the wrong side, and David couldn’t have lived without a team, without feeling he was part of something. When injury forced him off the ice at the age of twenty-two, Sune was the only person who understood that.

Sune taught David to be a coach at the same time as he was teaching Peter to be GM. In a lot of ways they’re each other’s opposite. David could get into an argument with a door, and Peter was so averse to conflict that he couldn’t even kill time. Sune hoped they’d complement one another, but they’ve developed a mutual loathing instead.