An opposing team arrives at an arena to play against Beartown Ice Hockey, but everyone on the team scornfully calls them “Erdahl Ice Hockey.” They already knew long before the match that they were light-years better than the peasants from the forest, but now they’ve just found out that Kevin isn’t even going to be playing. Beartown is nothing without him. A joke. Roadkill at the side of a freeway. As they arrive at the arena the players are confident and calm; they know that all they have to do to win is to play their game. Have ice in their stomachs. Keep themselves balanced.
Their coach is still outside, but the players are hyped up with pride; they want to see their opponents, so they go into the rink ahead of him. The lights in the corridor to the locker rooms are broken; someone jokes that “the poor peasants have probably nicked the bulbs,” and someone else replies: “What for? They don’t have electricity in Beartown!” At first they think the unmoving shape outside their locker room is just a shadow—their eyes haven’t gotten used to the gloom yet—so the first player walks straight into him. Benji’s chest is concrete; the whites of his eyes swivel toward each of the twenty players in turn. If they’d had time to react, they might have laughed nervously, but now they just stand silent in the darkness, their eyes darting about.
Benji doesn’t move. Just waits in the doorway. Forces them to come at him in order to get into their locker room. They should have waited for their coach, they should have gone to get a referee, but they’re too proud for that. When they lose their temper it’s predictable; he’s already identified which two it will be. One gives him a shove, the other hits him in the shoulder with his fist. Benji soaks up the first and responds to the second by hitting him so quickly on his ear that he falls to the ground with a yelp. Benji twists toward the first again and hits him twice in the ribs, not hard enough to break anything but enough for him to double up, whereupon Benji elbows him in the back of the neck so that he collapses on top of his friend. When a third player rushes toward him, Benji darts out of the way and shoves him in the back, sending him flying into the unlit locker room. The fourth makes the mistake of grabbing hold of Benji’s clothes with both hands; Benji headbutts him in the cheek and he falls backward with no one to catch him.
Obviously there’s no way he could have taken on the whole team in a well-lit room, but in a cramped, dark corridor where no more than one or two can attack him at a time, they all need to ask themselves the question: Who goes first?
The answer is that no one does. That’s enough—that single second’s hesitation from a whole group. Benji grins at them, then calmly walks off before anyone thinks of anything to say. When he opens the door to his own team’s locker room, “WE ARE THE BEARS!” from two dozen crazed voices echoes into the corridor, and the beam of light lasts just long enough for everyone on the opposing team to see exactly how off balance their teammates suddenly are.
They won’t say anything to their coach, because what would they say? That they let a single guy take out their four strongest players while the rest of them stood and watched? “What the fuck was that?” someone mutters. “Head case,” another one declares. When they switch the lights on, they try to laugh it off. They try to convince each other that they’re going to get number sixteen later, that it doesn’t matter, that they’re too good to care about something like that. When the game starts it’s very obvious that they haven’t succeeded. Rhythm, tempo, balance. Puffs of wind.
*
Benji pulls on jersey number sixteen. David stands in front of his team with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the floor. He has spent the whole journey here thinking about what leadership actually means to him, and has reached one single, shimmering conclusion: Sune has been his mentor, and Sune’s greatest strength was always that he nurtured leaders. His problem was that he never let them lead.
The players are holding their breath, but when David looks up at them he is almost smiling.
“Do you want to hear the truth, guys? The truth is that no one believed you could get here. Not your opponents, not the association, not the national coaches, and certainly not any of the people out there in the stands. For them this was a dream, for you it was a goal. No one did this for you. So this game, this moment . . . it belongs to you. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do with it.”
He wants to say so much more, but they’re in the final now. He’s done all he can. So he turns and walks out of the locker room. A few seconds later Lars follows, bewildered. The team sits there, at first just staring at each other in surprise. Then they stand up, one by one, and tap each other twice on the helmet. Of all people, the quietest of them is the first to raise his voice:
“Where are we from?” Filip asks.
“BEARTOWN!” the locker room replies.
Lyt climbs onto a bench and bellows: “FOR KEVIN!”
“FOR KEVIN!” the locker room replies.
Benji is already standing on the ice when they come out. Alone in the center circle, number “16” on his back, eyes black. The last to emerge from the Beartown locker room are the team’s largest player and its smallest. Bobo taps Amat on the shoulder and asks:
“Where are you from, Amat?”
Amat looks up with his jaw trembling:
“The Hollow.”
Bobo nods and holds up his gloves. He’s written Shantytown Hockey on them with a marker pen. It’s a clumsy gesture from a clumsy boy.
*
Sometimes they’re worth the most.
*
Why does anyone care about sports? There’s a woman in the stands who cares because they’re the last thing she’s got that gives her straight answers. She used to be a cross-country skier at the elite level. She sacrificed all her teenage years to skiing long-distance trails, evening after evening with a headlamp and tears streaming from cold and exhaustion, and all the pain and all the losses, and all the things other high school kids were doing with their free time that she could never be part of. But if you were to ask her now if she regrets anything, she’d shake her head. If you were to ask what she would have done if she could go back in time, she’d answer without hesitation: “Train harder.” She can’t explain why she cares about sports, because she’s learned that if you have to ask the question, you simply wouldn’t understand her answer.
Her son Filip is playing in the first line defense pairing, but she knows what he’s had to do to get there. All the running in the forest in the light of two headlamps, all the hours on the terrace firing pucks while his mom stood in goal. All the tears when he was the smallest on the team and used to measure and weigh himself every morning because the doctor had promised that his body would catch up with the others in the end. The pencil marks on the doorframe that his mom can’t bring herself to paint over now. The crushed little heap that she had to pick up from the kitchen floor every day when he realized he was just as short as the day before. Just as light. No one else may have noticed when he made himself into the best back on the whole team, but his mom was there every step of the way.