Hockey Hearts

The hallway smells like floor wax and stale coffee and the cold that lives in buildings with ice in them. Morgan Walsh's fingers are already numb. Nine AM means setup at eight-thirty, and she is early, because she likes to check the lighting before the subject arrives. The assistant coach warns her on the way in. *Because he'll give you nothing. That's just who he is.* At nine-oh-three, Connor MacKenzie walks in and stands two feet inside the room with his arms crossed. He got into hockey because his dad put him on skates at three. His first season in Northwood was fine. He doesn't have a favourite memory. Ask about the hit that ended his last season and the scar along his jaw goes white and he says *I fell.* Ask again and he says it flat. *I fell.* Next question. Morgan took this documentary because her producer handed it over with a pitying look and the alternative was another year of highlight reels. Jeanie Allard, who wanted the lead and lost it, has already texted: *First day, first kill. Don't screw it up.* What Morgan finds is not a difficult athlete. Connor's sister Lily is waiting in the arena lobby at half past five, because she has worked out that the payments are not a team expense. They are for Jamie's rehab. Connor's brother. The name Connor has not said out loud in months. So the captain of the Knights drives a rusted Honda, lives in a cheap downtown apartment, shows up to practice at five in the morning and carries a team that is losing, and the reporter filming him is the first person in three years to ask the right question. Then the bus out of Sudbury after a 6-1 loss, with Connor's forehead against the cold window and the snow swallowing the highway. Then a rink at midnight, a chili pot, a drive to Kingston he should not have made, and a moment on a hospital floor where it is Morgan's mother Carol in the ICU and Connor's knee pressed against hers in a chair too small for both of them. And then an email Morgan sent her producer is forwarded without her consent, a blog called Gym Jones runs it, and a two-page contract comes sliding across a glass table with the angle the network actually wants. *The story you were telling. Before you compromised your objectivity.* Hockey Hearts is a closed-door sports romance about a man who has been carrying the worst thing he ever did alone, and the filmmaker who has to decide what a true story costs. It ends with a championship game, a borrowed microphone and a whole arena listening.