And when hockey comes up in conversation, she doesn’t hesitate to mention the reading material that brought her to the sport: “If someone wants to talk to me about hockey, I will absolutely talk to them about hockey. If they ask, ‘Oh, why did you get into it?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, have you heard of hockey romance? It’s amazing.’”
And if they yuck her yum, showing disdain for queer hockey smut, then she knows they’re not for her: “If I have to dim the things I’m excited about in order to be cool to someone, then I don’t want to be their friend,” she says.
The cross-fandom pollination has gone in the opposite direction as well.
“I’ve seen hockey reporters say, like, I’ve got a bunch of new followers, if you want to learn the game, like, what do you want to know?” Held says. Show creator Jacob Tierney has been a guest on the hockey podcast What Chaos, and the Empty Netters podcast now recaps each Heated Rivalry episode. “I love it when people find a new passion. So I hope this leads to romance readers becoming hockey fans and hockey fans becoming romance readers, right? And then ideally, we would get a romance novel in like a year or two about people, one person from each fandom and how they fell in love together.”
The breakout success of the show has felt validating to readers, who hope to see more like it in the future, including plotlines of acceptance, diversity, and anti-homophobia that Reid explores in the series, which Held calls “very explicitly a critique of the NHL.”
In the here and now, however, romance enthusiasts are thrilled with the show’s success, and ready to welcome new fans into the fold.
“There’s a cool feeling of like, oh my God, we’ve known about this for so long,” Capizola says. “People are like, where did this come from? And we’re all like, it’s been here, welcome. There’s, like, seven more books [in the series].”
