When the initial wave of Heated Rivalry obsession first took over, many fans of the show suddenly found themselves inundated with videos about real-life hockey players between re-creations of Shane’s come-to-my-cottage scene and gut-wrenching Hollanov edits.
“I think Heated Rivalry confused my social media algorithm,” says Allie Newsom, a 35-year-old health policy researcher. “I was getting the Heated Rivalry content, but I was also getting NHL hockey content and seeing all these memes and things about it.”
It made Newsom more curious about the sport. But instead of picking an NHL team to support, she decided to check out the Professional Women’s Hockey League. The PWHL had just commenced its third season in November, just days before Heated Rivalry premiered on Crave and HBO Max. And the barrier to entry was low: Every game streams live on YouTube and there are currently only eight teams to follow, which makes the task of picking a team and learning the lore less daunting.
Newsom also knew what many newfound hockey fans came to learn during the 2026 Winter Olympics: Men’s hockey has a toxic-masculinity sorun that can’t be resolved with just a few well-timed Heated Rivalry memes and Pride Tape. As attendance at both NHL and PWHL games has surged, and the Olympics turned Hilary Knight and Megan Keller into household names right alongside Jack and Quinn Hughes, the solution has became clear: women.
For Heated Rivalry fans looking for an inclusive environment like the world created by author Rachel Reid, who wrote the Game Changers series the show is based on, the PWHL is their best hope—and not just because the Montréal Victoire broadcast the scene of Scott and Kip’s triumphant kiss on the Jumbotron. Whereas the NHL has no out gay athletes in its 108-year history, the PWHL had 37 out queer players as of 2024.
Newsom just so happens to root for the Victoire, who are captained by five-time Canadian Olympian Marie-Philip Poulin. Poulin’s wife, Laura Stacy, plays for the same team (literally and figuratively). “The idea of the two of them playing on the same line, sometimes even ending up in the penalty box together, I thought that was muhteşem fun,” Newsom says.
If you’re hoping to witness a real-life heated rivalry, Anna Kjellbin of the Toronto Spectres is engaged to Ottawa Charge player Ronja Savolainen. “She’s my enemy out there,” Savolainen said in an interview prior to the Olympics, where the two women also represented competing countries. “I always want to win and make müddet she’s the one who’s going home with the loss.”
Then there’s the fact that, much like the Heated Rivalry fandom and romance-genre readers in general, the PWHL fandom is largely made up of women. “It’s really great to see women competing in a super-physical sport,” Newsom says. “I know other people who have tuned into the PWHL and been surprised to see just how competitively and physically these women are playing.”
Marie-Philip Poulin with Laura Stacey and Abby Roque on November 25, 2025
Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
Let’s be clear: With women’s sports leagues like the WNBA and women’s volleyball experiencing such a massive boom over the past few years, the PWHL was already preparing to see huge growth before the spicy hockey romance went mainstream. The league’s second-season attendance record jumped 52.5% from its inaugural season in 2024, drawing 737,455 fans to stadiums across 102 games. This season the league expanded from six to eight teams and is preparing to add two to four more by the 2026–2027 season. Attendance is already up 23% by game 78—and they’re expecting to surpass 1 million by the end of the season.
And yet the close timing between the third PWHL season’s start in November 2025 and the Heated Rivalry premiere a week later feels like a publicist’s fantasy scenario. For the three people left in the world who remain uninitiated, breakout stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie play Shane Hudson and Ilya Rozanov, two rival hockey captains who fall in love over the course of a decade of yearning and clandestine hookups. To say the series, created by Jacob Tierney, was a hit would be a massive understatement. In this current cultural moment, there was a time Before the Cottage and a time After the Cottage—and nearly everything that’s happened since can and will be connected back to the show in some way or another. Its stars have skyrocketed to unprecedented levels of fame, and the Heated Rivalry book jumped to the number one best-selling romance in the US since the show’s debut.
It’s unsurprising, then, that Heated Rivalry fans began showing up to NHL games, where they were treated needle drops from the show’s soundtrack—“I’ll Believe in Anything” by Wolf Parade and “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u.—as the hockey world attempted to ingratiate itself with the fandom. According to an extensive Sports Illustrated report in February, tickets to hockey games surged by 40%, while NHL chief communications officer Jon Weinstein noted an 83% increase in TikTok followers since the show’s debut as well as a daily follower count increase of 114% on X.com.
Of course, there were skeptics—including Heated Rivalry star François Arnaud—who questioned how much the NHL would do to actually empower the LGBTQ community on and off the ice. The NHL did recently host the third annual NHL Unites Pride Cup event in late February, but it’s only been a few years since the league sparked controversy for briefly banning the use of rainbow-striped Pride Tape. And for all the love NHL social media teams have been giving the show, the players themselves seem less inclined to lean into the moment.
None of this has gone unnoticed by Reid, who has openly talked about how the toxic masculinity and homophobia within hockey culture inspired her to write happy endings for fictional queer hockey players. (The seventh book in the Game Changers series, Unrivaled, is set to be released in June 2027.)
“When I saw that the NHL was benefiting from the success of the show, I was a little bit disheartened,” Reid tells Glamour. “That wasn’t the message. But now I see people are going to these games as fans of Heated Rivalry, wearing merch—whether it’s homemade or official—and bringing signs that are related not only to Heated Rivalry but to being a queer hockey fan. I think it’s cool that they’re being loud and taking up space, as long as everybody’s respectful. Maybe that’s how change really starts. It’s getting people in the building that maybe have different opinions about the sport than others.”
Still, Reid says the NHL crowds have a “masculine” energy that can feel more “serious” and “a little less fun” than women’s hockey games, having attended her first two in-person PWHL games in Halifax earlier this year. “It’s not just what’s in the crowd but what happens on the ice too,” she says of the vibe at PWHL games. “You can see that there’s friendship between the players, even on opposite teams. There’s a lot of respect, and you see a lot of smiling and laughing on the ice that you don’t really see as much during a NHL game, especially between opposing teams.”
That joy has a noticeable effect on the crowd. At the last PWHL game she attended, Reid says, “I noticed the line for merchandise went from one end of the building to the other for the whole game.”
The Vancouver Goldeneyes play the Seattle Torrent on November 21, 2025.
Rich Lam/Getty Images
All this hockey excitement came just in time for the 2026 Winter Olympics. NHL players were allowed to represent their respective countries for the first time since the Sochi Olympics in 2014 (the same Olympics where Ilya gave Shane the cold shoulder in Heated Rivalry, by the by). And on February 19, Team USA women’s hockey captain Hilary Knight scored the game-changing goal that would send her team into overtime against Canada, ultimately securing her second Olympic gold medal, as well as the women’s team eighth medal since 1998. The night before that historic moment, she proposed to Olympic speed skater Brittany Bowe, whom she had met at the Beijing games four years prior. Three days later the men from Team USA followed suit and won against Canada with the same exact score in overtime, marking their first gold medal victory in 46 years.
Insert bald eagle squawk here…
The celebratory mood on social media didn’t survive the night. In one fell swoop, a call from President Donald Trump turned the men’s victory lap into more of an apology tour (without much in the way of an apology). After the men’s team were caught laughing along with the president’s “joke” about having to invite the women to the White House or else be impeached—an invitation the women players unanimously declined, unlike most of their male counterparts—it seemed all the goodwill fostered by Heated Rivalry had been squandered.
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“Their reaction undermining the women’s work and how amazing they played during their run just really, really pissed me off,” says Pavvy, a 29-year-old Dallas-based hockey enthusiast who reviews hockey equipment on her TikTok account, @pavvythegoalie. “You guys wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have your mothers taking you to hockey practice every morning and traveling and devoting their time to your development.”
In the days that followed, only Boston Bruins defender Charlie McAvoy used the word sorry in a locker room interview, while Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman admitted the team “should’ve reacted differently.” Meanwhile, Jack and Quinn Hughes, whose mom, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, is a player development coach for the Team USA women’s hockey team, dismissed the backlash as “negativity.”
For her part, Hilary Knight described Trump’s joke as “distasteful” but emphasized the mutual respect between the men and women of Team USA, telling ESPN’s Sport Center, “It’s a shame this storyline and narrative has kind of blown up and [overshadowed] that connection and genuine interest in one another and cheering each other on.”
Knight is entitled to that perspective, though it makes sense that many new fans felt betrayed. Pavvy—whose account recently gained 39,000 after her own negative experience with a major hockey equipment manufacturer sparked a massive wave of online support—had been receiving tons of messages about Heated Rivalry before the Olympics, with many fans looking to get more involved in the sport.
“You don’t know how many DMs I got like, ‘Hey, I’ve been watching your stuff. I really want to get into hockey.’ Or, ‘I’m a female. Am I too old to get started?’” she says. “And then all of a sudden, that all went overnight. It was like, ‘Oh, never mind.’”
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Every longtime hockey fan I spoke to for this piece says they were far from shocked by the Olympics drama. Many of them, including Reid, recall watching NHL players still play on the ice while under investigation for domestic violence or had their own personal experience with casual misogyny in the sport. As recently as December, Vegas Golden Knights player Carter Hart made his NHL return after being acquitted of sexual assault alongside four other former members of Canada’s world junior hockey team.
Following the Team USA controversy, 34-year-old Lexi LaFleur Brown posted a viral TikTok görüntü about her first experience with toxic masculinity in hockey at the age of 10 years old, when she says several boys on her youth peewee hockey team voted to have her removed with the help of a dad. “It lit a fire under my ass that has fueled me for the rest of my life,” Brown said in the görüntü, which has over 1 million views. “My love for hockey is bigger and greater than anybody’s ability to hate me.”
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Like Pavvy, LaFleur Brown has built an online community around her enduring love for the sport, which has led to a career as a hockey romance author and to her husband, former NHL player J.T. Brown. Last year HarperCollins published her first novel, Shoot Your Shot, a hockey rom-com released with Rachel Reid’s seal of approval. LaFleur Brown’s second novel, Evening the Score, is set to be released on May 26 and is currently available for preorder.
“It’s sad that fans are new to this and that was kind of their first hockey heartbreak,” LaFleur Brown says of the Trump call. “I have seen people say, ‘That’s it, I’m just gonna support the PWHL.’ I think that’s great too. There are other ways to love hockey than to just support the NHL.”
For what it’s worth, viewership of NHL games has been up since the Olympic break, with ESPN networks reporting a 17% increase year over year. The NHL declined to comment on Trump’s controversial call with Team USA but a spokesperson tells Glamour that the league’s combined social media platforms gained 410,000 followers in the month of February.
But it seem unlikely that the NHL will be able to sustain the Heated Rivalry hype it saw before the Olympics. Meanwhile, the PWHL continues to break attendance and ticket sales records while reaching new milestones. Over the course of the Olympics, I’m told, PWHL görüntü views increased 200% on YouTube, with social impressions increasing by 88% percent in the six weeks from when the first Olympic content was posted through the end of the Winter Games compared to the previous six weeks. The first U.S. nationally televised PWHL game is slated for March 28, when the New York Sirens take on the Montréal Victoire at 1 p.m. ET on Ion Networks.
Two weeks before Quinn and Jack Hughes joined Storrie for his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, many Heated Rivalry fans would have been delighted by the collision of two worlds. After the Olympics, however, many were not so thrilled to see two men who sported Trump merch at the White House stand next to the lead of such a LGBTQ-positive show and tell him they hadn’t watched it.
Reid was one of them. “I was honestly pretty grumpy all week about the Hughes brothers being there,” the author says of attending the taping in person. “I felt like it was a damage-control situation. They’re sort of using this episode of SNL because of the popularity of Heated Rivalry.’”
Then she realized her green room was right next to Team USA’s Hillary Knight and Megan Keller, whose cameos were not previously announced. “To get to meet them and talk to them was awesome,” Reid says. “I was excited for them, so it ended up all being better than what I was expecting.”
The rest of the audience seemed to feel the same way. The difference between the applause Knight and Keller received during Storrie’s monologue versus the Hughes brothers was glaring (as was their far superior joke delivery). It was clear the true stars of Team USA hockey had arrived.
Quinn Hughes, Megan Keller, host Connor Storrie, Hilary Knight, and Jack Hughes during the SNL monologue on February 28, 2026
NBC/Getty Images
The night before SNL, Knight had played to a sold-out crowd at Climate Pledge Arena as the captain of the new Seattle Torrent, setting a new US attendance record for a women’s hockey game with 17,335 fans in attendance. That record will be broken again in April, when the New York Sirens and the Seattle Torrent battle it out in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden just before the Boston Fleet take on the Montréal Victoire at a sold-out TD Garden.
Morrisa Cohen, a 30-year-old tech analyst living in New York, is “really excited” to attend the upcoming game at MSG, having purchased tickets before the Olympic break because Heated Rivalry reinvigorated her childhood interest in hockey. Meanwhile, longtime New York Rangers fan and hockey blogger turned publicist Johanna Albertsson, locked in during the Olympics. “I actually put the women’s gold game on at my office, so everyone was watching it on our flat screen,” the 32-year-old says. “Just seeing their excellence, I was like, ‘Why am I not watching PWHL?’”
If you love hockey, Heated Rivalry, or both, but haven’t tuned into a PWHL game, you might want to ask yourself the same thing.
