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T here’s a town in a forest that loves a game. There’s a girl sitting on a bed playing the guitar for her best friend. There’s a young man sitting in a police station trying not to look scared. In a hallway in a hospital, a nurse walks past a lawyer talking loudly into her cell phone. In the stands in an ice rink in a capital city grown men and women are on their feet, shouting that they are the bears from Beartown, along with sponsors and board members who ten years before laughed at a GM who said that one day they would have the best junior team in the country. Now everyone who is connected to the club is here except the GM.

A team is waiting in a locker room, sticks in hand, waiting for a game to start. A little brother is waiting on a bench with a phone in his lap, waiting to see what his friends will write about his sister on the Internet when they find out what’s happened. A law firm gets a call from a wealthy client, and at another law firm a mother starts a war. The girl goes on playing her guitar until her best friend falls asleep, and in the doorway stands a father, thinking that the girls will survive this. They’ll be able to deal with it. That’s what he’s afraid of. That that’s what’s going to make the rest of the world go on thinking that everything is okay.

***

There’s a player with the number “16” on his back who, ever since he learned to skate, has had to learn exactly what it takes to win. He knows that games are won as much in the head as they are on the ice, and his coach has taught him how hockey is musical: every team has a rhythm and a tempo they like playing in. If you disrupt that rhythm, you disrupt their music, because even the best musicians in the world hate being forced to play out of time, and once they’ve started it’s hard to stop. An object in motion wants to keep going in the same direction, and the larger a rolling snowball gets, the more of a fool you have to be to dare to stand in its path. That’s what sportspeople mean by “momentum,” whereas in physics lessons at school teachers talk about the “principle of inertia.” David was always rather more blunt when he used to talk to Benji: “When something goes right for a team everything feels easy, so it automatically goes even better. But if you can cause a bit of trouble for them, only a very little bit, you’ll soon see that they manage to create a lot more trouble for themselves.” It’s about balance. The slightest puff of wind can be all it takes.

***

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.

***

Tails has spent the entire warm-up with his phone in his hand, trying to find out what’s happened to Kevin. Still nothing. He suspects that David is the first person Kevin’s dad will contact when they know anything, but he can’t get in touch with the coach from here.

The sponsors and board members around him are angry about the lack of information. They’re already talking about which lawyers to contact, which journalists to share the story with, who’s going to be punished for this.

Tails isn’t angry; his emotions have reached another level now. He looks at the parents in the stands. Tries to add up all the days and evenings and nights they’ve devoted to this team. He feels the weight of his own silver medal from another age around his neck. He doesn’t know who’s snatched their chance of victory from them, but already he hates them.

***

It’s Benji who tells David and Lars to let Lyt play in the center in place of Kevin. There will never be enough words to describe what that would mean to Lyt. Before the first face-off Benji stops in front of Amat and asks:

“Have you got your fast skates on today, then?”

Amat grins and nods. Their opponents are already talking loudly on their bench about “making number sixteen take his penalty calls.” They’re not idiots; they’ve seen Benji for the violent lunatic he is. So when the other team wins the face-off, Benji skates at full speed with his stick raised toward the player who gets hold of the puck, and everyone who saw number sixteen in the darkened corridor a while back obviously realizes that he’s going to ignore the puck and go straight in for the hit. His opponent braces his skates and tenses his body to absorb the impact.

It never comes. Benji goes straight for the puck and pokes it between the defenseman’s skates into the offensive zone, Lyt takes a hit in the neutral zone and is sent sprawling across the ice like a shot seal—a center sacrificing himself to give the third player in the line enough space. They get one single tiny chance in this game before their opponents realize how fast Amat is.

***

They take it.

***

Tails screams until his voice gives out when Amat waits out the goalie and lifts the puck into the top of the net. Parents rush down the stands as if they were going to vault the boards. Amat glides around the net with his arms in the air but doesn’t get far before he is engulfed by Benji, Lyt, and Filip. The whole team is on the ice in moments, under and over and on top of each other. Tails grabs hold of someone’s mother—he doesn’t know whose—and screams:

“WHERE ARE WE FROM?”

A moment ago they were all atheists. None of them is now.

***

They’re leading 1–0 after the first period. David doesn’t say anything to them; he doesn’t even go into the locker room. He stands in the corridor with Lars without a word. Hears the players tapping each other’s helmets. Their opponents pull back to 1–1, then go ahead 2–1, but just before the second intermission, Bobo gets one of his few shifts, and the puck finds him at the offensive blue line. He tries to pass but the puck hits an opposing player’s skate and bounces back toward Bobo. If the boy had had time to think, he would of course have realized that it was an idiotic idea, but no one has ever accused Bobo of being quick-witted. So he shoots. The goalie doesn’t even move, and when the net behind him does Bobo is left standing there, staring in shock. He sees the lamp light up, the numbers on the scoreboard change to 2–2. He hears the celebrations from the Beartown section of the stands, but his brain doesn’t register the sequence of events. The first one to reach him out on the ice is Filip.

“Win!” he yells.

“For Kevin!” Bobo howls, and throws himself at the glass with such mad pride that he forgets to take his stick back to center ice when play resumes.

***

Filip loves hockey, and so does his mom. And not like some vaguely interested parent who barely knows the rules. She worships this sport for all that it is. Tough. Honest. Definite. True. Straight answers, straight questions.

Maggan Lyt is standing next to her. She and Filip’s mom have known each other since they were children, and now live two houses apart. They used to go skiing together, got married the same year, had their sons just a few months apart, have stamped the numbness out of their toes in stands just like this one for more than a decade. Do you want to try telling them that hockey parents are fanatical? They’ll tell you to go to a junior cross-country skiing tournament and listen to the spectators there. Or talk to the slalom dad who rushes out onto the course and sabotages a whole tournament because he thinks the course has been set up to disadvantage his daughter. Or talk to the figure skater’s mom about how much a nine-year-old really ought to train. There’s always someone who’s worse. You can get almost anything to look normal if you make enough comparisons.

Filip’s mom never screams. Never shouts. Never criticizes the coach and never goes into the locker room. But she would defend Maggan to the end of the world and back if anyone criticized her friend’s behavior. Because they’re also a team. Filip’s mom has learned that you can’t ask parents to devote their whole lives to their children’s sport, risk the family finances, and then expect that passion never to overflow occasionally.

So when Maggan screams, “Are you blind!?” at the referee, Filip’s mom is quiet. When another parent screams, “For God’s sake, Ref, did you get dropped as a baby, or what? Does your wife make all the decisions at home?” she says nothing. Then someone says, “What kind of old woman’s pass was that?” and a man farther up the stands throws his arms up and yells, “Are we playing basketball now?” When one of the other team’s players holds a Beartown player a little too long against the boards without getting penalized, one parent yells, “Are you a homo or number twenty-two?” when the boy returns to the bench.

A mom with two small children farther down in the stands turns around and says: “Can you think about what you’re saying, please? There are children here!”

But Maggan replies, her voice dripping with derision:

“Well, sweetie, if you’re so worried about them leaving their cozy little nest and hearing something terrible, maybe you shouldn’t bring them to HOCKEY games!”

If you were to ask Filip’s mom why she doesn’t protest, she would say that you can love something without loving everything about it. You don’t have to feel embarrassed about not being proud. That applies to hockey, but it also applies to friends.

***

The mother with the young children demonstratively takes them by the hand, goes off to the steps, and sits down farther away. Out on the ice, Filip is chasing an opponent all the way across the ice, throwing himself forward to block a pass, and getting him off balance. Benji sets off toward them.

One sponsor higher up in the stands turns to Tails, nods toward the mother with the children, and snarls:

“Have we got the fucking morality police in today? What’s she doing here?”

The third period has only just started. Tails’s reply gets drowned out by the roar of the crowd when number sixteen steals the puck in the neutral zone, fakes out two opponents with a technique no one knew he had mastered, and slams a shot into the net that the goalie gets nowhere near.

Benji brushes aside the other players when they try to hug him, gets the puck from the net, and goes straight over to the Beartown parents. He stops by the boards a short distance away and waves to two ecstatic little children, then throws the puck to their mother.

The sponsor turns to Tails and asks: “Who... who’s that, did you say?”

“That’s Benji’s sister, Gaby. And those children’s uncle has just made it 3–2 for us,” Tails replies.