Hockey is so much more than a game. It’s a fact we all know from lived experience. If you’ve ever watched your team win at home, caught a double-overtime playoff game on FaceTime with your friends, or cried as medals were placed around your favourite players’ necks, you know. The emotions around this sport run so high and sink so deep. The game takes us out of our bodies sometimes; it goes beyond the players on the ice and beyond us. Hockey can be this collective feeling in the air, a communal triumph or defeat, a chance to come together as one to celebrate and mourn.

In the wake of Team USA’s gold medal win at the 2026 Winter Olympics, men’s ice hockey discourse has trended towards the latter. There is a somber cloud around us now. The way we talk about this game may never be the same after this week. A bubble has been popped, so to speak, as NHL fans watch the men they’ve come to support and root for pop bottles with FBI Director Kash Patel and trade jokes about the women’s game with U.S. President Donald Trump. Now, as the roster likely heads to Washington, D.C. to attend the State of the Union on Tuesday night, we must contend with the unavoidable.

While anyone with a brain will tell you that hockey’s claim of being apolitical is a myth, that myth has carried us through some of the darkest moments of this sport in the past few years. Online progressive hockey fans have relied on the lack of social commentary from players as a kind of plausible deniability for a while. If a player never publicly supported conservative politicians, this created a safety net for fan consumption where one could assume their heroes harboured no political malice. Fans would cite players’ use of Pride Tape and throw around PR statements about locker room inclusivity as shields. “My blorbo would never…” became a refrain whenever an Instagram following list revealed yet another player followed Trump or Matt Walsh or Jordan Peterson or someone of that ilk. Interacting with hockey seemed to have become a game of “Your Fave is Problematic,” and the fans argued as lawyers, advocating for their client’s absolution from the toxic culture we all know lies under the surface of the ice.

Now, the suspension of disbelief has snapped. Everyone on that Team USA roster openly welcomed and partied with the man responsible for covering up the largest pedophile sex-trafficking ring in United States history. They cheered at the idea of hopping on a plane funded by U.S. taxpayers to head home in style. One even implored Trump to “close the northern border,” and another called him “dad.”

Harrison Krank@HarrisonKrank

You can hear the genuine pride in Donald Trumps voice when he called the Team USA Hockey Team

10:10 AM · Feb 23, 2026 · 12.2M Views

---

2.41K Replies · 17.4K Reposts · 134K Likes

When Quinn Hughes is shouting out the troops and Auston Matthews is saying he’s proud to be an American, there is no more pretending about who these men are and what they stand for. The answer, in short, is nothing but themselves and their boys.

This is something even those in supreme denial have always known. We can’t act shocked by the actions of Team USA, for that would be an insult to our intelligence. We know better than to trust an institution where physical abuse and sexual violence are woven into the fabric of its history. The only folks who deserve that sympathy at this time are the waves of female and queer fans coming in post-Heated Rivalry, who may be discovering for the very first time what hellish nightmare they’ve signed themselves up for.

I can’t imagine what comes next for this sport. I don’t know if this win and its aftermath have permanently derailed the demographic shift we’ve witnessed over the past six years (and especially so in the past three months). There has been a swelling of discontent, however, which suggests this could be the case.

Personally, I’ve watched dozens of friends leave the hockey community over the years, and the number’s grown exponentially since the Hockey Canada Five verdict over the summer. Even the most stubborn of us have breaking points — moments when we can’t reconcile our love for the game itself with our hatred for the culture it creates. At a certain stage, no matter how much hockey means to you, distance can become a necessity for safety.

woodchuck todd stan account@peakcinema

this is how your email finds me

8:07 AM · Feb 23, 2026 · 28.2K Views

---

2 Replies · 1 Repost · 39 Likes

If you’re someone thinking about taking a step back from the sport right now, I do not blame you. In fact, I wish you nothing but peace at this time. It is never the responsibility of minorities to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of intangible “progress.” We live in times when hockey’s future, much like the world at large, is utterly uncertain. It’s always one step forward, thirty-two steps back with the NHL. There is no guarantee the seeds of hope we sow today will bloom tomorrow.

Yet I do want to make something abundantly clear to anyone feeling alone, helpless, confused, and lost right now. The events of this week will never take the sport away from us. Even if the entire conclave of enthusiastic online progressives vanished tomorrow, in ten years’ time, some Gen Alpha kids are going to find a Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith fancam set to Lucy Dacus and lose their goddamn minds. Each time I’ve thought “that’s it, rock bottom, there’s no coming back from this” when it comes to hockey’s conservatism, I’ve been proven wrong. Instead of this strange and beautiful diaspora of hockey fandom collapsing, it’s grown tenfold.

According to the latest stats, the NHL’s fanbase is 37% female (likely larger given that report’s 2022 release date) and 44% of hockey fans in Canada are women. The global phenomenon of Heated Rivalry has introduced millions of queer folks to the sport in the past three months. I know from my own experience as a queer hockey writer that this sector of the audience is growing faster than traditional hockey culture knows how to keep up. And when we raise our voices in unison, the numbers speak volumes.

So, while I will never tell someone how to respond to this tide of fascism in the United States (and many other countries) right now, I would hope that we don’t wave the white flag quite yet.

You see, my Offsides co-founder, Arielle Lalande, and I have threatened to quit hockey about once a week for the past two and a half years. It’s never stuck, no matter how serious either of us was, no matter how much whatever news that week stung, no matter how bleak this culture seemed. I don’t fully understand why. It’s one of the reasons I’m pursuing a Master’s Degree right now. I am desperately trying to figure out how these alternative fandom communities sustain when daggers are pointed at them. For how do you love a sport that doesn’t love you back? That wants you dead, even?

The closest I came to leaving hockey was this summer. I was working full-time and commuting six hours round-trip each day; I barely had time to sleep. So when I got into the office one morning and saw the video of Brayden Point and Hayden Fleury laughing at a joke about the Hockey Canada trial, I broke down. Point was a key part of the team that got me into hockey in the first place. I spent hours watching his play, behind the scenes clips, and fan content of him with my dearest friends. We had inside jokes and fond memories from that time. It was something I held sacred, the foundation of my love for this game. While I wasn’t shocked and I didn’t cry at the video, something died inside me that day. I thought with that emotional core gone, I could never find a path forward in this sport. I only stayed because we had a dozen new contributors join Offsides that week, and it didn’t seem fair to them to blow everything up.

With time, I realized that is exactly why we stay in hockey: for each other. For the community. For the people like us who we know are out there and facing the same fears. When I first interviewed female and queer NHL fans for my research, whenever someone provided a sobering and honest account of hockey culture, I asked them what makes them stay in the sport in spite of the harm. The answer was always some version of this. A groupchat. A Discord server. Mutuals on Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok. Just seeing tweets and articles from people who had the same thoughts and feelings as them.

One of our photographers, Kat Morris, told the Offsides work chat once that “knowing we have [a community], and knowing there are people that want to help, means so much. It’s so easy to get lost in the twitter scare, but every time I come back here, I know I’m not alone.”

I try to keep this in mind when the hockey news cycle gets tough. I imagine a trans kid in ten years who’s been bitten by the same bug I was in 2022, and I think about how I don’t want them to feel as alone as I did. I want this community to sustain, grow, and thrive, so one day, it’s not a complete oddity to love men’s ice hockey and love being queer in tandem.

The same questions cross my mind each time: if I don’t stay, who will? And if no one stays, how does this sport get better?

If you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that hockey culture may never truly improve in the ways we want it to, that is completely fair. I’m scrolling by these videos of Team USA, and I don’t really see how we fix something this rotted. I don’t know how I will ever root for some of my favourite players the same way again. Fringe hockey subcultures live in the wilderness, and right now, we are lost in a thicket of thorns.

But if you’re a stubborn bitch — as I’ve come to learn most queer hockey fans are — and you’re looking for hope amidst the pain, look to your friends. Look to your mutuals. Look to your chosen family. You are not the only person upset. You are not the only one who thinks these actions are morally reprehensible and should not stand. This is where you will find the comfort your escapism no longer can provide.

Fascists want us miserable. They want to destroy us in more ways than one, and one of those tactics is taking away all sources of joy from the oppressed. The MAGA movement descends upon this sport like an invasive species of mold, demanding we uproot ourselves and claiming hockey as theirs. Don’t f*cking let them. Don’t let them take away the game you love. Because if we give up, if we all leave, if we forsake what we hold dear, then they have won.

As the Team USA news circulates, I’m thinking of my friends once again.

Charlie still sends me videos of his queer roller hockey league. He’s been playing goalie for months now, and he’s getting good. I remember the day he called me to show off the pads friends gave him and the sheer glee in his eyes. Every few weeks, he sends our groupchat of trans guys a new story of gender euphoria, when he makes a killer save, and his teammates line up to shower him with affection and call him “bro.”

Candi, a Leafs loyal, bonded with Bruins fans at work over hating the Florida Panthers. When she moved across the country to Boston, I believe one of the first things she did was go to open practices to catch a glimpse of Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov. Then she started going to games at my alma mater, Boston University (Roll Terriers), with Katrina and Michelle. She owns more merch than me now. Last year, I got to see her new home and the places she’s come to love with a backdrop of the 4 Nations Face-Off. Our college-age friend group fell away with time, but hockey has kept us closer than we’ve ever been.

Parker called me during the gold medal game because it was daytime in Ireland. Since he’s been back in Europe, our schedules never line up for FaceTimes. But on Sunday, for once, they did. We watched the third period together, our cross-continent internet holding shakily, and we groaned together when Hughes scored the overtime winner. Instead of spiraling into despair — sensing what would soon emerge from the afterparty — I asked him about the novel he’s working on and whose play he liked best on Team Slovakia. He talked eagerly, as he always does, and I was grateful for the distraction.

Matthew and Cody went to an OHL game after Canada lost. The night before, Matthew surprised me with a selfie of the two of them grinning ear to ear; I had no idea they were meeting up. It made my day. One of them is from Georgia and the other from Ontario. I don’t think they would have met if it weren’t for hockey, but now, I can’t imagine a world in which they do not know each other.

Arielle and I were sitting in Centre Bell at a pre-season game in October when we realized we’ve known each other for six years. I look back at some of the roughest times in both of our lives, and hockey is always there. Sometimes as a salve, sometimes as a flame, but always bringing us together. It has given us countless good memories, dear friends, and some of the most surreal experiences of our lives. I know I’ll always stick around this sport as long I have her by my side to scream about it with.

Hockey is so much more than a game. It is a political tool, a socially corrupt institution, and, even still, a means to rebel against it all. With the actions of Team USA players inspiring such raw emotions from diverse fans, that last point may seem absurd, but I firmly believe it will hold fast. No community has given me as much hope for the future as female and queer hockey fans have.

Conservatives and Nazis want to ostracize us into non-being right now, and we cannot let them win. Staying strong, holding onto what you love, and fighting for it to be better spits in their faces. Banding together as a chorus of dissent makes their ears bleed. It is a radical assertion that we will not go quietly into the night, that unity is stronger than fear, and that you will pry this sport only from our cold, dead hands.