Impact

Prologue

The first thing I ever loved was the sound of blades slicing into fresh ice.

In Québec, winter isn’t a season. It’s a citizenship test. It comes early, stays late, and presses its frozen palms against every window in town.

Snowbanks rise taller than cars, and your breath hangs thick in the air as the St. Lawrence River turns steel-grey and endless.

Somewhere between the first snowfall and the last thaw, boys become hockey players.

I was five when my father laced up my first pair of skates. They were second-hand, with stiff, cracked leather and laces that were far too long. I remember him kneeling on the cold wooden bench of the community rink and pulling them tight with careful hands.

“Balance first,” he says in French, his voice steady. “Speed comes later.”

I don’t remember learning to skate; I only remember falling in love with the feeling of it.

The glide, the edge, the split second of flight before gravity catches me again.

The sound of the rink lights humming overhead and the smell of metal and cold water in the air.

I chased the puck until my lungs burned and my legs shook, and I still didn’t want to leave.

Hockey isn’t just a sport here. It’s an inheritance.

A language. It’s how you prove you belong.

At twelve years of age, I woke before dawn every day for practice.

When I turned fourteen, scouts were watching.

At sixteen, my shoulders were broad enough to carry the expectations.

Coaches told me they liked my vision and the way I could read a play seconds before it happened.

At that age, I wasn’t the biggest player on the ice, but I was relentless.

I took hits and got back up. I played like someone who trusted the ice to hold him.

I still do.

The cold shapes and sharpens me. It taught me that beauty can exist in brutal places, and it also taught me how to leave pieces of myself behind.

I met Camille the summer I turned seventeen, at a bonfire by the river as the snow finally surrendered and Québec felt soft again. Her dark hair curled in the humidity, and her laugh startled me more than any body check ever had.

She doesn’t care about hockey the way everyone else does.

She cares about art, books, and cities beyond the province line.

She teases me constantly about my early bedtimes and strict diet, but I’m committed to the game and to my career.

She drags me to music festivals and makes me taste food I can’t pronounce.

When I talk about plays and penalties, she listens, but she never lets the game define me.

To her, I’m just Lukas, not the hockey player.

“You’re more than what you do,” she told me one night, lying beside me on the hood of my truck, staring at a sky dusted with stars. “Don’t forget that.” I told her I wouldn’t.

We grew together in the in-between spaces of my seasons.

We spent summers by the water, and then there were stolen weekends between road trips and late-night calls from hotel rooms across Canada.

She falls asleep with the phone pressed to her ear as I study playbooks by dim lamps.

It’s a dance we’ve learned to navigate well.

When I made my first professional roster at twenty-one, she cried harder than I did. For the sacrifices we’ve both made and the future we couldn’t secure.

For years, our lives moved in rhythm with my career.

Contracts were signed, multiple cities visited, and numerous injuries survived.

Camille enrolled in university while I chased the dream, and then she started working at a small gallery downtown.

We talked about apartments and a possible future, about someday settling into a nice place. But hockey has its own gravity.

The offer came in early spring. It was unexpected and exciting. A team in the United Kingdom were interested in drafting me.

The Manchester Panthers. A city in northern England, known for being cold and rainy most of the time.

It isn’t the NHL. It isn’t the childhood dream etched into frozen ponds across Québec.

But it’s something different. It’s a league that’s growing fast. A chance to be a cornerstone rather than a shadow.

It’ll mean more ice time and greater visibility.

But it also means distance from my family and Camille.

“England?” Camille repeats when I tell her, her voice flat.

“Manchester,” I say automatically, as if that makes it easier.

The contract lies between us on the kitchen table of our apartment, heavy with possibility. I’ve read it a dozen times and know every clause, number and promise. “It’s two years,” I say quietly. “Maybe more.”

She looks at me the way she does when I line up a risky shot; calculating odds, measuring consequences. “And where do I fit into that?” she asks. It’s a fair question.

I don’t have an answer that doesn’t sound like betrayal.

I could ask her to come with me, to leave her job, her friends, her language.

She’d have to trade the streets of Montreal for unfamiliar rain and foreign crowds.

I could promise that distance won’t hollow us out.

But hockey has always been my first love.

And I know, in the way I know when a puck leaves my stick just right, that if I turn this down, I’ll regret it forever.

There’s a lot of discussion about logistics, keeping a long-distance relationship alive, and back-and-forth visits.

There’s talk about time zones and “we’ll figure it out.

” But beneath every practical word lies something heavier; the slow realisation that we’re standing at the edge of very different futures.

The night we end it is quiet. There is no shouting, no slammed doors. Just rain against the apartment windows and the city humming outside.

“I don’t want to resent you,” Camille says, her hands wrapped around a mug that has gone cold. “And I don’t want you to resent me.”

I reach for her hand and memorise its warmth. “I love you,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says, and that somehow makes it worse.

When she walks out a few days later with the last of her boxes, the apartment feels cavernous.

My gear bag sits by the door, already half-packed for another continent.

I stand alone in the kitchen, staring at the empty space where the contract once lay, and tell myself this is what ambition demands.

This is what I have to do to achieve my dream.

Sacrifice and risk.

In Québec, I learned that to move forward on the ice, you have to push backwards first.

The morning I leave, the air is sharp and bright. My parents hug me at the airport, and I see pride and worry tangled in their expressions. Snow lingers along the edges of the runway, stubborn and familiar. I try to commit the scene to memory, not knowing when I’ll be home again.

As the plane lifts off, I watch the province shrink beneath me.

Rivers threading through white fields, towns stitched together by roads I can trace in memory.

Somewhere below lies the rink where I first learned to stand.

There’s the apartment where Camille’s laughter once filled the rooms. Ahead of me lies Manchester.

New ice. New colours. New expectations. I press my forehead against the window and close my eyes.