The U.S. Hockey Men Spoil The Fantasy

To be a U.S. Olympian is to represent the best that your country has to offer. That sounds extremely lofty when it's written out like that, but I think that's really how it works, ideally, if you're taking in the best possible message from NBC's explicitly patriotic broadcast. Even I can feel it, in my most big-hearted moments, particularly after I've watched the figure skating events: Alysa Liu's infectious joy, or Ilia Malinin's humility in heartbreak. America is filled with optimistic people who are great at a lot of different things, they make me believe. It gets me feeling good about a place that I call home, which is kind of hard to do nowadays.

Heading into the Olympics, male hockey players were enjoying an unprecedented streak of great PR. Heated Rivalry, the TV show that captivated North America with steamy gay hockey-player sex, is only the tip of the iceberg for the whole hockey romance phenomenon, which uses the NHL as inspiration for a fairy-tale world where its players are dreamy lovers with innocent souls. In the universe of Heated Rivalry, you could build a Cup-winning top line out of openly gay active pro hockey players, even though the NHL has never had one, and a certain amount of wishful thinking also propels the hetero-themed books I've read in this genre. In Mile High, for example, the league's most notorious bad boy (who plays for Chicago of all places) is, beneath the rough exterior, a real sweetie of a boyfriend who just needs healthy support as he processes his parental trauma. And in Kiss And Don't Tell, a young woman facing car trouble has to spend the night in a remote cabin with five male players, but it turns out they act about as threatening to her as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

These books are very good at accomplishing what they set out to do, but it was a strange contrast to read them as someone whose only prior association with hockey players and sex was horrid stories of misogyny and assault. Hockey culture is rotten, but these stories offer a kind of escapist hope: What if it's not? What if the flesh-and-blood players on the ice are just like these boys on the page?