Page 77 of The Last Inch Of Ice
It’s from Rykov’s post-game press conference. The Comets just beat the Bruins 4-1, and Rykov is doing his usual stoic routine at the podium. A reporter asks him about the upcoming road trip—a brutal stretch against Tampa, Florida, and Carolina.
Rykov, looking characteristically grim in his team-issued hoodie that somehow makes him look even more intimidating, answers the question with his typical economy of language.
“We’re confident. We’ve prepared well. It’s about execution.”
Standard hockey-speak. Nothing remotely interesting.
Then he pauses. Shifts slightly in his seat. Looks directly at the camera.
“But we’re not worried,” he says, his voice dropping to that low, deliberate rumble that Kai can feel in his chest even through his phone screen. “We just have to focus on our own game. Playour system. It’s not about flashy plays or gettingcutewith it. It’s aboutbeing hardto play against, every single shift.”
Another pause. His dark eyes boring into the camera.
“Some guys aresatisfied with just being hard. We preferto be hard to beatandto be hard to replace.”
The press room laughs — that stupid automatic laugh reporters give to standard hockey clichés. Someone asks a follow-up question about defensive zone coverage.
But Kai just sits there on his designer couch, his meal prep forgotten, his phone clutched in his hand.
A hot flush creeps up his neck, spreading across his face.
A double-entendre so blatant it’s almost obscene, hidden in plain sight behind the veneer of acceptable sports jargon.
And it’s a risk. A small one, yes—ninety-nine percent of people watching wouldn’t look twice at the comment. It’s standard “hard-nosed hockey” rhetoric that every coach and player has used since the invention of the sport.
But the subtext is there. The slight emphasis on the word “hard.” The way he looked directly at the camera like he knew exactly who’d be watching.
The sheer audacity of Rykov responding in kind, of playing this game in front of millions of viewers, sends a jolt of something dangerous straight through Kai’s system.
He watches the clip three more times, analyzing Rykov’s expression, the tone of his voice, the deliberate cadence.
Then he throws his phone across the room where it bounces off a throw pillow and lands safely on the carpet.
“Fuck,” he says to his empty apartment.
Bonifazio, who’s been sleeping on the cat tree by the window, opens one eye to give him a look of supreme judgment before going back to sleep.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kai tells the cat. “This is a perfectly normal reaction to psychological warfare.”
Bonifazio’s tail twitches.
* * *
The next few weeks are miserable in ways that make Kai nostalgic for the regular, manageable misery of earlier in the season.
The team keeps losing. Not spectacularly—they’re not being blown out—but in those soul-crushing, close games where they’re good enough to stay competitive but not good enough to actually win. Overtime losses. Shootout defeats. Games where they’re up by two in the third period and then collapse.
The media, which had been genuinely excited when Kai signed with Toronto — the prodigal son going to his father’s team, the narrative practically writing itself — has turned on him again with the enthusiasm of a mob that’s found a convenient scapegoat.
The narrative is taking shape across every sports platform: Kaisyn Callahan, the flashy, inconsistent winger with the famous last name, is a toxic presence in the locker room.
A pretty distraction who can’t win when it matters.
All style, no substance.
The kind of player who puts up points in meaningless games but disappears when the pressure is on.
Kai suspects his father’s PR machine might even be feeding the narrative. It’s exactly the kind of controllable way Doyle Callahan would keep his disappointing son in line — let the media do the work of humiliation so he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty. And afterward, he’ll still accuse Kai of tarnishing the family name.
