Let me start with a confession. When we first started planning this trip, I was very, very sensible about it.

It was a research trip. Capital R. I write hockey romance, and I’ve written a lot of it — whole teams, whole families, whole universes of men who skate fast and feel things deeply — and almost all of it has been built from my couch in Tasmania, watching games at ungodly hours with a blanket, a cup of tea and the cats judging me. I know the rules. I know the rhythms. I know what a good line change looks like. But I have never actually sat in an arena and felt one.

I wanted to know what the cold coming off the ice smells like. How loud it gets when the home team scores, and how quiet it gets when the visitors do. What the concourse sounds like between periods. Whether you can hear the skates from the stands. The little things. The things that make a reader go, oh, she’s been there.

So: research. Very professional. Tax-deductible-adjacent.

And, fine, there was one other thing on the list. A bucket list thing. His name is Tom Wilson.

Tom Wilson is my hockey hero, and I will not be taking questions. On the ice he is a big, aggressive mountain of Canadian man, the kind of player who makes opposing forwards quietly reconsider their life choices. Off the ice he’s the softie who reads Harry Potter by wand light. If I wrote him into a book, my editor would tell me he was too much. Nobody would believe it. That’s exactly why I love him, and he’s the reason I wanted to be in the building. That was the original plan. Watch Willy play. Maybe cry a little. Go home happy.

Then there’s the supporting cast, because I am a Caps girl down to my bones and I have favourites. Pierre-Luc Dubois, my other favourite forward. Logan Thompson in goal. The Outlaw. Josie. And the Pro brothers, Big Pro and Little Pro, Aliaksei and Ilya Protas, who are the only men on earth who can make Tom Wilson look small. I’ve seen it happen. It’s unsettling. It’s like watching a mountain stand next to two bigger mountains and suddenly look like a hill. A whole roster of men I’ve yelled at, cheered for and adopted from the other side of the world at three in the morning, and I was going to get to see every one of them in person.

And Ovi? Ovi was the bonus. The cherry on top. Getting to say I’d been in the same building as Alex Ovechkin, a fixture of my hockey life for so long that it felt a bit like planning to go and meet a weather system.

So we built the trip around the Capitals. Three games, three Canadian cities, one long, slightly unhinged road trip in December. Edmonton first. Then the drive down to Calgary to see them at the Saddledome, in its very last season, which felt like history all on its own. Then the big haul back west to Vancouver for the last game before we fly home. I bought thermals. I bought more thermals. I have been informed, by people who live in actual snow, that I still have not bought enough thermals.

And then Ovi announced his retirement.

I’m not going to pretend I took it with grace. There may have been a noise. Possibly a word I don’t put in my books. Because just like that, the bonus became the whole thing. I still love Willy. He’s still my guy. But the trip I’d been calling research has turned into something else entirely. It’s not the research trip anymore. It’s the Ovi Farewell Tour. Three chances to watch one of the greatest goal scorers the game has ever known, in what is now his final season, and I get to be in the building for three of them. I didn’t plan that. Nobody plans that. The timing just landed in my lap like a puck off a lucky bounce.

Here’s the thing, though. From the outside, this probably looks like a fan going on a holiday to watch some hockey. And it is that. I’m not going to dress it up. I am going to scream. I am going to buy merch I do not need. I am going to spend three entire games trying very hard not to cry every time number eight touches the puck, and I am going to fail. Probably during warm-ups. Possibly before we even find our seats.

But it’s so much more than it looks.

It’s the first time I’ll be standing in the world I’ve spent years writing. Every rink I’ve ever built on the page, every locker room, every press box and bench and tunnel — I’ve imagined all of them. Now I get to check my work. I get to find out what I got right and, more importantly, what I got wrong, and what I never even knew to wonder about. My Pioneers and my McKenzies and all their messy found families are going to be better for it. I can already feel the books shifting.

It’s also a trip I’m taking with people who matter. My writing partner and I have been making stories together since around 1998 — we’ve been doing this longer than some of my characters have been alive — and for the first time we’ll be making them in the same country, in the same car, on the same long icy highways. I don’t expect we’ll get many words written. I do expect we’ll plot out loud for hours, argue about who gets hurt, and come home with more ideas than we can possibly use. And the most important part? Jo is coming too, which means someone will be sensible about dinner and someone will remember where we parked. She’s dealt with my obsession for so long I’m pretty sure that we now share obsessions, right down to Big Willy.

And it’s about time. Not in the ‘it’s about time I did this’ sense, although yes, also that. I mean time itself. How you can follow a player for years, through every season and every playoff heartbreak and every record, and think of him as permanent. And then one day there’s an announcement, and you realise you were watching an ending the whole time, you just didn’t know which chapter you were in.

I write happily-ever-afters for a living. I believe in them, deeply. But I also know that the best endings are the ones you get to witness. You get to be there. You get to say goodbye properly, instead of reading about it the next morning over toast.

So that’s what this is now. Part research trip. Part bucket list. Part pilgrimage. Part three friends and a hire car versus the Canadian winter. And part a very grateful fan getting to stand up, three times, and say thank you to a player who gave her years of joy from the other side of the world.

I’ll report back. With notes. With photos. With, almost certainly, more feelings than is strictly professional.

Research, remember. Very serious research.

Go Caps.

— Bella x