Chapter Text
The funny part is that nobody meant for it to happen
There was no master plan taped up on a whiteboard in the Centaurs front office labelled PHASE THREE: COLONISE WESTBORO. No edict sent out on team letterhead suggesting that former players settle within a six‑block radius of Winston Avenue. It just worked out that way.
You can chart it on a map, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys that sort of thing. Start with the corner where Westboro Community Rink sits, quietly humming. Follow the line of kids’ bikes leaned against the side wall and the faint smell of new rubber from the renovated plant. Cross the street and you hit a squat, bright storefront with a hand‑painted sign that reads HAYES’ HEROES & PAPERBACKS. Turn the corner and you’re at a grill with a patio that looks too nice for its name - Boodram’s Grill House - and yet somehow exactly right for the man who runs it.
Between those three anchors, most of the empire’s ghosts have found somewhere to land.
***
If you’re new to town, the first clue that something is off comes when you walk into Hayes’ Heroes on a Saturday and realise that the man ringing up your kid’s trade paperback is a former Vezina winner.
Wyatt Hayes does not advertise this fact. The chalkboard in the window lists weekly specials - “Buy 2 back issues, get 1 trade half‑off” - and a modest sign about “goalie gear drop‑off for community swap.” There are no replica trophies, no framed jerseys, just a slightly crooked 31 on the wall behind the counter that looks like a fan gift until you look closer at the inscription.
Regulars know the drill. Kids come in clutching allowance money and lists scrawled on looseleaf. Hayes, still wearing the same battered ball cap he once pulled down over his eyes in every scrum, squints at their choices with the same calm seriousness he used to reserve for odd‑man rushes.
“You like that one?” he’ll ask, nodding at a dog‑eared volume of some long‑running superhero series.
A shy nod.
“Okay,” he’ll say. “But if you like quiet guys who save the day, this one’s better written.”
He’ll slide over an indie title from the second shelf, the one where the hero has anxiety and still gets to be the main character.
Once a week, after closing, the shelves at the back roll away to make space for a mismatched semi‑circle of folding chairs. Parents think it’s just for the after‑hours book club, which is half true. The teenagers sitting there, hands wrapped around paper cups of hot chocolate, do spend a solid fifteen minutes arguing about continuity snarls and whether the art was better before or after issue fifty.
Somewhere around minute sixteen, though, the conversation always drifts. Someone will mention a coach who keeps calling them “Butterfingers” after one bad practice. Someone else will say, too casually, that a teammate used a slur in the room and nobody corrected him. Hayes listens. He has the same posture he did in the crease - still, alert, watching the angles.
“Okay,” he’ll say eventually. “Let’s talk about what you can do next.”
If a parent lingers too long, they’ll hear snippets about boundaries, about how to ask an adult for help, about the strange, exhausting negotiation of deciding which parts of yourself to sand down to survive a room. The posters on the wall still look like superheroes, but nobody in the chairs is confused about which battles really matter.
Later, if you catch Hayes locking up, you might see him set aside one particularly battered goalie biography to slide into the window display.
“Relatable?” his partner will ask, amused, as they pull down the blinds.
“Cautionary tale,” he’ll say. “We like those in this neighbourhood. So we don’t repeat them.”
***
Across the street, Boodram’s Grill House announces itself more loudly.
The sign is big and uncomplicated: BOODRAM’S, in chunky block letters, with a tiny 13 tucked into the corner if you know what you’re looking for. On game nights - local PWHL, junior, NHL, beer league, doesn’t matter - the place is full enough that the servers move like they’re killing penalties, sliding between tables at the last possible second.
If Hayes’ shop is where the quiet kids go to find out they’re not alone, Boodram’s is where everyone goes when they need to be loud.
The menu is half Trinidadian comfort food, half Canadian bar staples. Doubles sit beside wings and burgers. There’s a chalkboard list of “Bood’s Favourites,” most of them items that involve alarming amounts of spice, and a smaller note at the bottom that reads, in neat block letters: IF IT’S TOO HOT, TELL US. WE’LL FIX IT. NO SHAME.
It doubles as the house policy on almost everything else.
On any given evening, you can find a table of retirees arguing about line changes from a playoff run that ended years ago, and a table of teenagers in Centaurs and PWHL jerseys, sweating gently after practice. The staff know half of them by name; Boodram knows more than half.
He does the rounds like he used to do his shifts: eyes up, keeping track of who’s on the ice and who’s drifting into trouble. When a group of U18 boys gets too rowdy, he doesn’t bark so much as loom, nudging the energy down with a well‑timed eyebrow. When a quiet kid in the corner flinches at a joke that goes too far, he appears with a plate of fries and a deft change of subject.
“It’s just burgers,” he insists, when people try to make a big deal of it.
It isn’t just burgers, any more than it was ever just finishing a check. There’s a reason Hollander once joked in a podcast that if you want to know what “protecting your teammates” looks like in retirement, you go sit at the bar at Boodram’s for an evening and watch who he chooses to stand next to.
The walls back this up.
Between the black‑and‑white photos of old Pittsburg - and the older, worse Ottawa years - there are snapshots of summer skates at Westboro Rink. Kids in ill‑fitting gear, women in PWHL practice jerseys, non‑binary teens in Irina camp T‑shirts, familiar numbers in the background every third photo, laughing or texting or hauling mats out for a session upstairs.
Someone tacked up a scribbled sign near the coat rack that reads: NO JERK POLICY. Bood claims a regular wrote it as a joke. Nobody feels the need to take it down.
***
Then there’s the rink.
From the street, Westboro Community Rink still looks like what it has always been: a single‑sheet barn with sensible siding and a too‑small parking lot. The new roof blends in. The new plant hums more quietly than the old one, but you only notice if you knew the previous soundtrack well enough to miss the rattle.
Inside, there are more changes.
Near the entrance hangs a small plaque listing “City of Ottawa, Westboro Community Trust, Hollander–Rozanov Family” as partners, in that order. Upstairs, the hallway that used to lead to a damp storage room now opens onto bright doors with simple signs: Irina Foundation. Game Changers. Community Room.
If you’ve been following hockey for any length of time, you know what those names mean. If you haven’t, the receptionist will happily explain that Irina runs workshops on inclusion, mental health, and access, that Game Changers trains coaches and leaders on how not to ruin the kids in their care, and that the Community Room can be booked by anyone who needs it, as long as they’re not trying to sell condos.
On a typical weeknight, the ice below hosts everything from learn‑to‑skate to high‑school practice to a local PWHL team’s skills session. Upstairs, one of the Irina staffers leads a group of teenagers through an exercise on setting boundaries online while the dull roar of a public skate filters up through the floor.
Sometimes the people leading those sessions are staffers with clipboards and PowerPoint decks. Sometimes they’re retired stars who live within pushing‑stroller distance.
“You’re really just… here,” a kid said once to Hollander in the hallway, wide‑eyed, as he balanced a tray of coffees and a stack of handouts.
“Sometimes,” he said. “It’s a good rink.”
Nearby, Rozanov corrected a volunteer on how to pronounce a camper’s name and then went back to arguing with a PWHL assistant coach about the merits of a 1‑3‑1 versus a 2‑3 on the power play. It’s the kind of scene that would have made certain commissioners from another era break out in hives. In Westboro, it’s a Tuesday.
Ask anyone who’s been around long enough, and they’ll tell you that this is the end of a story that started somewhere very different: with a poverty franchise and a turbulent flight, with two stars choosing each other and a team deciding, quietly and stubbornly, that love and friendship could be assets, not distractions.
The academic types at McGill have turned it into a case study. The fans in Ottawa just call it living here.
***
So yes, if you stand on the sidewalk at the right time on the right evening, it looks a bit like someone misplaced half the Hall of Fame into one postal code.
You might see Hayes locking up the comic shop, a kid pounding on the glass to show him the goalie mask they drew. You might see Boodram leaning in the doorway of his grill, trading chirps with a couple of regulars who definitely recognise that ring on his finger and choose not to mention it. You might see Hollander and Rozanov crossing the street from the rink, arms full of flyers and snacks, arguing amiably about which of their current favourite contestants will make it to the next round of their baking show.
You might, if you’re particularly unlucky, try to park badly and discover just how fast three ex‑pros can materialise to give you a polite but firm tutorial on which spots are reserved for the accessible entrance.
Locals joke about it now.
“Careful,” a neighbour will say to a bewildered cousin visiting from out of town. “If you stay too long, you’ll end up opening a community‑minded small business and accidentally changing the trajectory of a sport.”
The cousin laughs, then looks around at the cluster of familiar numbers and unfamiliar logos and realises, slowly, that they’re only half kidding.
Because that’s the other thing about empires, as one long‑suffering beat reporter once wrote. The banners and rings are the loud part. The real work is quieter, tucked into the corners of city budgets, baked into lease agreements, serving wings to a table of tired teenagers, sliding a trade paperback across a counter and saying, “I think this might be for you.”
If you want to know how this neighbourhood became a retirement village almost by accident, you could start here, at the end, with a comic shop, a grill house, and a rink that still smells like cold and rubber and possibility.
Or you could rewind to the beginning: a plane, a speech, a trade, a discount contract, and two idiots who decided that if they were going to take over hockey, they might as well make it nicer while they were at it.
Either way, the path runs straight through Westboro.