Heroes by Ray Robertson

— Bayle would every Saturday afternoon listen to his father at the wheel of the car go through pre-game strategy:
    â€œThese guys on Dolson Mowing, these guys have got speed and know how to use it, Peter, these guys like to skate. So don’t get caught standing around out there, okay? Don’t let your man get away from you. You’re just as big as they are, so use your size, make your man pay for his space out there, keep him honest. Remember how we saw Sittler take care of Clarke last Saturday night? Do it just like that, Peter, just like number 27, just like the captain. Get all over him, son.
Make him pay.”
    Once actually inside the rink Bayle’s father would drift off to smoke and talk with the other puffing fathers in the cloudy arena lobby while his mother would buy Bayle and his sister hot chocolate and their choice of one treat each from the canteen before joining the other coffee-drinking hockey mums at the shiny shellacked picnic tables. Bayle and Patty would leave the grownups behind and sip their hot chocolate and eat their candy bars and watch the hockey game being played before Bayle’s own from the freezing wooden rink-side bleachers.
    Even when the boys from his own team would begin to arrive at the arena Bayle would sit with his sister in the stands. Not because his parents said he had to, but just because he liked to. Bayle’s teammates were Bayle’s teammates, but mostly they bored him. Even if six years his junior, Patty never bored Bayle.
    â€œI don’t know why they call us Pee Wees, Patty. It’s just what they call us, I guess. I never really thought about it.”
    â€œPeter, if you hold your cocoa like this the steam warms up your nose and then it heats up the rest of you. I wonder why it’s like that. Why do you think it’s like that, Peter?”
    â€œPatty, save some of your Snickers for later. Look at me: I’ve only taken two bites out of mine and you’re already almost done.”
    Patty stopped attending Bayle’s hockey games when she discovered that cricket was the national game of Great Britain. Bayle tried his reasonable best to convince her that as much as she might want to be — and even though Canada
was
a part of the Commonwealth — she’d always be Patty Bayle from and of Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada. But Patty had decided to become a British subject.
    Bayle quit playing hockey not long after. He was going into Grade 9, just starting high school, and there were other, more interesting things he wanted to do with his spare time. Like going out for football. And dances, and girls.
    After Patty had quit coming to his games, and just before he hung up his skates for good, Bayle had been struck by the fact that no matter how hot you got when you were down on the ice playing — even when you were sitting on the bench between shifts — how incredibly cold it was to just sit in the stands by yourself and watch a game, no matter how interesting the match-up. He’d never realized just how cold it was to sit up there and simply watch.
    Bayle knew he should ask Samson and Duceeder about the story in the
Eagle,
should probably try to work the team’s threatened move into his own projected article somehow, but before he could formulate a properly journalistic question Davidson was making his way toward the press box.
    Mindfully slow, like a man walking a tightrope without looking down, Davidson advanced up the aisle, a can of Coke in one hand, a portable computer and small printer hanging from the other. As in the truck earlier that day, he looked only in the direction he was going.
    â€œMr. Davidson, good evening,” Samson said. Bayle nodded. Duceeder didn’t lift his gaze from the zamboni circling the ice.
    â€œSamson,” Davidson said. He removed his old suit jacket and carefully folded it and placed it on the counter. He pulled a stool from underneath, sat down, loosened his tie, plugged