One
Cassie Pearsonwas never late on game days.
At thirty, she had already spent eight seasons on the Pittsburgh Renegades beat, long enough that her body moved through the routine before her mind caught up. She slipped through the employee entrance of Allegheny Arena with time to spare, credential already out, her stride efficient and practiced. Downtown Pittsburgh was fully awake now—traffic humming along the main arteries, the city settling into its weekday rhythm. The air carried a light October chill, crisp rather than punishing.
She had started on the beat as a fresh-faced intern with a notebook too big for her bag and a voice she hadn’t yet learned to steady in interview scrums. At this point, the job was muscle memory. Game days were part ritual, part endurance test. Her mornings usually began with covering the skate at the team’s downtown rink. She’d park on the side street around the corner, nod at the security guards and ushers who now knew her by name, and step into the chilled air that always smelled faintly of ice, coffee, and sharpened steel. She’d watch for line combinations, ask Coach Scott Parker about injury updates and that night’s matchup, then make her way around the Renegades’ locker room for interviews, parsing tone as much as content, collecting the small details that would matter later.
After the skate, she’d drive back across the river and hole up in her Mount Washington apartment as she turned notes into clean copy. By mid-afternoon, she’d squeeze in a Pilates class and catch a quick nap before heading back to Allegheny Arena around five o’clock, two hours before puck drop, to claim her seat in the press box and finish last-minute prep. Predictability had become a comfort to her. After years of travel and late nights, there was something grounding about knowing exactly where she needed to be and when.
People imagined sportswriting as glamour and front-row seats. In reality, it was long drives, bad coffee, surviving on hotel breakfast buffets and late-night DoorDash orders after games. The one “glamorous” perk—rubbing shoulders with famous athletes—was usually more awkward than fans realized. After wins, players could be chatty and indulgent. After losses, they sometimes stared through reporters like they were furniture. Cassie had learned to ask direct questions with empathy, to absorb clichés without flinching, and to let frustration roll off her shoulders without ever letting it dull her curiosity.
When she did get to enjoy the job, it came in flashes: the roar of the crowd in the distance as she waited outside the locker room after a win; the sight of a seven-year-old in a jersey pressing his face to the glass, in awe when the Renegades’ longtime captain Tanner Brooksskated by; the way the air crackled when the horn sounded and twenty thousand people rose as one. Those moments carried her through nights when dinner was stale popcorn and the hot water in her hotel room never quite worked. She’d scribble a reminder in her notebook about a question she needed to ask the next morning, then lie awake, adrenaline still buzzing long after the rink had gone dark.
Tonight, though, the narrative hovering over the Renegades wasn’t about scoring or standings. It centered on one player: No. 48,Lucas “Luke” Anders. The team’s newest acquisition, and the story everyone in the building was waiting to see unfold.
Two
Luke Anders was the kind of hockey player marketing departments loved. At six-foot-four, he had a lean, understated presence—broad through the shoulders, but not bulky, the kind of frame that read functional before flashy. His dark hair fell just past his ears, usually pushed back rather than styled, giving him a slightly unpolished look that cameras seemed to favor anyway. His face was sharp but boyish at the same time: straight nose, strong jaw, pale skin dotted with faint freckles, and wide brown eyes that made him look more open than most defensemen ever allowed themselves to be.
Luke signed with the Renegades this season on a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract with a full no-movement clause—an investment that signaled the team expected him to be a cornerstone of the future. For a franchise at the tail end of a rebuild and still trying to build a blue-line identity, he was supposed to be the missing piece, someone who at thirty years old could bring leadership to the young defense.
Luke had grown up on Vancouver Island, skating on frozen ponds until his toes went numb, then climbing onto a ferry to play travel games on the mainland. His father worked long days at the shipyard; his mother stitched together extra jobs to pay for equipment. After playing junior hockey in the prairies of Saskatchewan, he’d been drafted by the Chicago Blades at eighteen years old. By twenty-five, he’d been a top-pairdefender. The contract with Pittsburgh was both a bet on his upside and a reward for his previous years of development.
Luke’s first few games with the Renegades were a disaster. His passes sailed wide. He missed assignments in the defensive zone. When the puck was on his stick, he second-guessed himself as he overthought the intricacies of the Renegades’ new system. The local sports call-in radio shows were brutal. Columnists called the signing a mistake. Cassie, who prided herself on fairness, wrote about his slow start but also noted that adjusting to a new team can take time, especially for a defenseman. She used quotes from his teammates and coach to contextualize his struggles. In private, Luke appreciated that nuance even if the headlines screamed panic.
Luke had arrived in Pittsburgh early in the summer to get comfortable with his new home. He rented a loft in the Strip District—a converted warehouse with exposed brick, industrial beams and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Allegheny. He loved the loft’s open kitchen and the fact that he could walk to Primanti Brothers for sandwiches. He spent August unpacking boxes, buying mismatched vintage furniture from local thrift stores and hanging posters for some of his favorite bands – The Blue Nile, Bon Iver, The National among them. He wasn’t from Pittsburgh, but he wanted to root himself there. The fact that he’d chosen the Strip instead of the suburbs was unusual for a player. Aside from the rookies, most teammates gravitated toward gated communities in Sewickley or Cranberry. Luke liked the bustle of the market stalls and the hum of trucks unloading coffee beans at dawn.
Luke hadn’t expected to be talking about his feelings to a journalist, especially not one as disarming as Cassie. She was compact and fit, her dark hair usually pulled into a sleekponytail, and she asked pointed questions without sugarcoating the truth. On the third game of the homestand, he noticed her waiting near his stall in the locker room, a notepad in hand. For a moment he wondered what it would be like to talk to her about something other than his plus-minus.
They exchanged professional pleasantries. She asked him about his confidence level, about whether he felt pressure to justify his contract. He gave the standard answers. Later, while they both waited for elevators, he said, “I read your piece last week. It was fair.”
Cassie blinked. Most players avoided acknowledging they read coverage. “Thanks. I try,” she replied, trying not to stare at his eyes.
The elevator doors opened. They stepped in with a videographer and an equipment manager. Silence hummed. Cassie felt Luke’s presence beside her like a live wire.
Cassie knew the unspoken boundaries of her job. Every journalism ethics seminar hammered it home: personal involvement with sources can create conflicts of interest, and romantic relationships with sources can “give the appearance of partiality,” It was important for reporters to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, because trust was the currency. Her newsroom’s policy echoed that. Staffers could have lunch with sources but had to remain aware of the line between business and friendship. Anything more than that—regular coffee runs, shared gym sessions, romantic dinners—was out of the question.
So when Luke’s casual remark about reading her article sent a jolt of warmth down her spine, she immediately shut it down internally. Off limits. She told herself she’d simply caught him in a thoughtful mood. Or maybe he was just being polite? He was Canadian, after all.
Three
Cassie had joined the Renegades beat eight seasons ago, a twenty-two-year-old with a degree from Point Park and a passion for hockey that predated her memories. From day one she learned that she would be the only woman in most rooms she entered. The press box at Allegheny Arena was a sea of gray heads and polo shirts, the hotel bars where postgame gatherings happened were full of veteran columnists trading war stories. Cassie knew she stood out, not only because she was one of the youngest ones on the beat, but because she wore eyeliner and a ponytail in a world of scruffy chins and baseball caps.
Being the only woman came with a constant, low hum of self-consciousness. She was hyper-aware of how she laughed, how she dressed, how she asked questions. If she lingered too long near a player’s stall, she worried someone would misinterpret. If she pushed a source too hard, she fretted about being labeled difficult. She had learned to calibrate her tone and posture, to lean just far enough forward to project confidence without being accused of flirting. The men around her could afford to be sloppy. She could not. She knew any misstep would be magnified, catalogued, and remembered.
In her second season, the Renegades drafted a Czech winger namedMichal Dvorák. He was twenty and earnest, with halting English and a wicked wrist shot. His locker was tucked near the door, away from the veteran leadership. Cassiegravitated to him in those first weeks because his quotes were unvarnished, and felt as if they were going through a similar experience as they learned to work in the best league in the world. She wrote stories about his adjustment to North America—the pierogi he loved, the way he FaceTimed his mother after games despite the time difference. It was innocent and, from her perspective, part of the job.
An older columnist, a man who had been covering hockey since the Renegades’ early days and who had never quite warmed to the idea of sharing the beat with a younger woman, decided otherwise. Cassie overheard him speaking with another reporter in the locker room one night, his voice pitched just loud enough: “Our girl down there is always at Dvorák’s stall. Must be more than quotes she’s getting.” The implication stung. She flushed, anger and humiliation warring in her chest. The rumor slithered through the press box, no matter that it was baseless. Michal was cute in a boyish way, but Cassie felt more like his translator than any kind of partner. Besides, he wasn’t her type—if she had time for dating at all.
Still, the damage was done. She pulled back. She stopped going to Michal’s stall unless in a group. She told herself it was temporary, but the self-censorship gnawed. Eventually, the rumor died off. When Michal was traded to Ottawa the following season, she felt a pang of guilt for being relieved. Not that she had anything against him—he deserved to thrive somewhere he could get more ice time—but without him, she no longer had to calculate how often she spoke to a player lest someone speculate about her motives. It was a lesson she wouldn’t forget.
Those early scars made Cassie cautious to a fault. She watched male colleagues banter with players about fantasy football and thought about the double standard. She reminded herself shewasn’t there to be friends; she was there to chronicle games and lives with fairness and accuracy. And yet, every so often, she longed to lower her guard. To talk to a player without counting the seconds. To sit at a stall and swap stories without worrying about who was watching.
That tension—between professionalism and humanity, between perception and reality—was part of what made Luke Anders’ presence so disorienting. Her instincts, honed by years of rumors and whispers, told her to keep distance. Her curiosity, the part of her that had once connected with a Czech rookie over homesickness and schnitzel, wanted to know the person behind the contract. Being the only woman on the beat meant she could never forget those past lessons. It also meant she had to decide, over and over, how to walk the line between doing her job and living her life.
Four
Cassie usually used the postgame locker room access period to float between stalls, recording group scrums and then peeling off for one-on-ones. It was in those off-camera side conversations that Cassie felt she got her best material. She had made a career of being respectful in those moments, never burning players with quotes meant to be off the record.
