Chapter Two
Olivia Starling [off-screen]: Jax, how are you feeling about the new coaching team?
Jax: Good, yeah. I mean, we all love Phil, and he and Lindy are the only real changes.
Olivia Starling: The Sea Lions are now the first NHL team to have a female head coach. Is that a political move?
Jax: Still me?
Olivia Starling: Any of you.
Breezy: I don’t get the question.
Olivia Starling: Last season, you made headlines as the team who worked with the gay shelter—
Jax: LGBTQIA-plus.
Olivia Starling: Now you have the first female head coach. Do you think women should play in the NHL?
Breezy: Oh, um, I don’t understand what about this is political, but you know the players don’t hire the coach, right? We’re just glad we have real coaches this year who actually want us to win.
Top comments:
sealions4lyfe: Chris Calabrese is immune to subtext
calabreezy: @sealions4lyfe—wish that were me
seelionssaylions: Breezy may be fast on the ice but he sure is the opposite in the head
(Post-practice media availability, San Francisco Sea Lions, 09/20/2025)
Training camp with a competent coaching team was brutal.
It had been brutal with an incompetent coaching team as well, even more so because they sent Luca down to the AHL at the end of it (in retrospect, less a reflection on his performance and more a statement on Trout’s attempts to sabotage the team).
This year, it was brutal in the way professional sports ought to be, leaving them all sore and exhausted by the end of each day.
Lindy, despite her cheerful, bubbly exterior, took zero prisoners.
Luca had an inkling that she’d chosen this tactic to silence those members of the team who might otherwise scoff at the idea of a female NHL coach.
On the first day, she made everyone run sprints for a full twenty minutes directly after they had all finished their conditioning tests.
When one of the prospects vomited a long stream of red Gatorade into a wastebasket—just as a trainer managed to position it under him—Lindy patted his shoulder and told him at least he was trying, unlike the rest of them.
“Ice time is twenty minutes a night minimum if you want to play first string,” she called out cheerfully when Hayes complained about bag skates being old-school.
After conditioning tests and endless sprints, they all got a long and pointed speech from the new GM, a young guy who’d been a minor league player in New Mexico for a few years before making a fortune on a patent of a new helmet design.
Luca hoped he would be a decent human being when he exchanged Spanish greetings with Mooney, but as the meeting wore on, he began peddling the same shit every other GM did.
They had to sit in their sweatpants and listen to him talk about increasing diversity and how well they were doing with their ongoing sponsorship of the Pot of Gold shelter.
Luca wanted to believe the GM cared on a moral level, but when his presentation about growing the game within historically excluded demographics switched over to approval ratings and viewing figures on the team’s exclusive streaming platform, Luca’s faith in a true change in the front office waned.
He kept his opinions to himself. Not everyone had to be as cynical as him. Jax and Breezy, the resident team golden retrievers, nodded along to everything, and at one point, Breezy even raised his hand to ask a question.
Tom sat behind Hayes and Vanderbilt, which meant they couldn’t so much as trade skeptical glances without him clearing his throat.
But despite the actions of a few decent teammates, Luca knew what to expect from hockey.
He’d been playing his whole life, and ever since puberty, the sport had meant the chance for speed, exhilaration, and the pure joy of blocking the shot or stealing the puck.
But it also meant endless taunting off the ice for being too small, too pretty, and too effeminate.
Luca’s skill had only made it worse, the others’ fear of their own inadequacy compounding their cruelty.
Hayes and Vanderbilt knew not to say anything disparaging about the shelter around Tom.
They knew not to take party drugs publicly and not to use their real names when they signed up for dating apps despite being married men.
They also pretended they’d gotten over their issues with Luca after a certain number of team bonding outings so Breezy wouldn’t stage an intervention.
But Luca’s faith in their ability to be assholes as soon as any witnesses vacated the room was as strong as ever.
Hayes elbowed him in the gut every chance he got in practice; Vanderbilt wouldn’t pass to him unless he had no other option, sometimes including the other team. Luca couldn’t prove their intentional malice, but he knew.
It was still light-years better than any other team Luca had played on.
At least the majority of the Sea Lions’ leaders weren’t rampant homophobes.
He would take a little wordless bullying over being called every slur his teammates could come up with, which had happened when he played in Winnipeg.
That experience had inspired him to turn tail and run home to Italy a year before he hit draft eligibility, leading to him being chosen low in the second round.
Italians weren’t less homophobic, but at least there, no one made fun of Luca’s looks.
And his skill differential with his teammates was large enough that they hadn’t risked alienating him for fear of losing a star player.
The cruel irony was that Luca’s actual sexuality (decidedly not straight) did not matter.
The idiot teenagers in the OHL called him gay because they hated him, and they also hated gay people.
Had they known Luca had been in the process of realizing their insults were not merely hurtful but accurate, his teammates would have been so much worse.
Sometimes, he wondered why he’d stuck it out so long.
“Breezy, Mazetti, you’re up,” Lindy called, and Luca hopped over the boards.
The ice felt smooth under his skates, his legs aching with pleasant soreness from the last three days of practice.
They were playing two-on-two on half the ice, forwards against defense, while Edwards, the offensive coach, ran passing drills on the remaining half with the rookies and AHL prospects.
Luca recognized a few of them from his stint with the Pups, the Sea Lions’ minor league farm team in San Diego.
But he’d been there only a few weeks before the Sea Lions called him up to San Francisco.
Saying hello would remind them to resent him, especially as he got to play with the more established team members, showing off his abilities to Lindy and Phil.
In their shoes, Luca would hate himself too. They were playing their hearts out, and the head coach wasn’t even watching. Meanwhile, here he was, going two-on-two with the very best in the league.
As he and Breezy took to the ice, Luca remembered why, despite all the downsides, he still loved to play: a stubborn desire to prove everyone wrong who’d said he couldn’t, and the pure excitement of fresh ice and new challenges.
“Jax leaves his left side unguarded when he’s about to pass,” Luca muttered to Breezy as they got into position.
Breezy nodded once, the whistle blew, and they were off.
Tom was fast, which was surprising for a man who had turned thirty-three recently.
Keeping up with him challenged most defensemen in the league.
Luca had slightly better endurance, though, and when it came to stick handling, Luca could see himself catching up someday.
Tom had him on experience, but Luca spent hours on dexterity drills every week, improving steadily.
He lost the opening face-off, something he lacked experience in as a defenseman, but it took him all of fifteen seconds to have Tom up against the boards and the puck on his own stick.
Luca shot it across the ice to Breezy, who used his own burst of speed to escape Jax.
Breezy was a different kind of D-man than Luca, more classically defensive.
His contributions to the penalty kill and the board battles he often won made Breezy valuable, but his explosivity made him special.
Luca was all about consistent speed and good edgework, allowing him to turn an attack on their goal into a scoring chance.
Breezy didn’t go for complex strategy, which was why he struggled to quarterback the power play.
But when he got the puck, he could push into action faster than any defenseman Luca had ever seen.
As far as Luca was concerned, what Breezy brought in terms of physicality and reliability made him one of their biggest assets, and he didn’t think so just because he had a crush.
God, it sounded juvenile when he thought of it in those terms.
Breezy caught his eye and jerked his head, and Luca followed the cue to switch places.
They hadn’t discussed it beforehand, but it was a good play. Tom’s speed made Luca a more natural fit to go up against him. But Tom and Jax wouldn’t be expecting this—Luca’s footwork against Jax’s sheer power and Breezy’s strength against Tom’s finesse.
Breezy crossed the ice in time for Tom to catch him, battling it out for the puck. He managed to get it away from Breezy and send it in Jax’s direction, but Luca was quick to turn 180 degrees on his edge and grab it out from under Jax’s nose.
He sent it hurtling straight back to Breezy, knowing he couldn’t take Jax in a board battle, and Breezy sauced it straight through the lines of prospies on the other side of the ice, into the empty net of Tom and Jax’s nonexistent team.
Breezy whooped, cruised up to Luca, and grabbed him in an overblown celly. Off the ice, Luca wasn’t much of a hugger, but here, he let it happen, Breezy’s big, warm arms around him through four layers of sweaty hockey gear.
It was as close as he would get.
He was so pathetic.