It’s 6:30pm on the first Monday of 2026 and the Nest, the lightly tumbledown bar in a 117-year-old house on SE Belmont, is packed. Every table in the light-strung back room and on the adjoining patio is occupied. Trivia doesn’t start till 7pm but has already hit capacity (70 people, 20 teams). Host Sarah Giles tells latecomers she’s running it again at 9:30. The din is extraordinary. Standing at the top of the staircase off the back door, surveying the giddy masses, I feel my insides vibrate.

Circling, I meet friends Kate and Allison. A school counselor and teacher, respectively, they decline to give last names and are dressed in matching red and brown flannel (a reference). Allison has made stickers (“I Might Knock,” a blue sock with bananas on it, a can of Canada Dry). “Show her the loon you embroidered!” says Kate, and Allison produces for me a gray sweatshirt on which she has sewn a very elegant loon. With a third teammate (she’s away from the table and I don’t get her name, but I later confirm she’s wearing the same flannel), they make up David Hollander’s Charger. Their competition includes Ilya’s Glute Routine, Shane’s Back Arch, Rose’s Gay Boyfriends, and, of course, Stupid Canadian Wolf Bird.

Heated Rivalry is a TV show, yes. It is also an unqualified phenomenon. The Canadian series, which is both fantastically hot and achingly tender, follows a yearslong romance between two closeted pro hockey stars: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a mild-mannered, half-Asian Canadian who plays for Montreal, and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), a brash, bad-boy Russian who plays for Boston. Written and directed by Jacob Tierney, it’s based on a set of romance novels by Rachel Reid and was produced by a Canadian network called Crave. HBO Max licensed it just a few weeks before it was set to debut in Canada, and it began airing in late November with almost no promotion. It has since become the most-watched live-action show HBO Max has acquired since its 2020 launch. Season 2 was confirmed on December 11.

The show’s fandom is rabid online, but also here, on a Monday evening in January, at a family-owned bar in Southeast Portland. Giles (one half of Funny Sexy Cool Trivia, every Monday at the Nest) is pink-haired, heavily tattooed, and dressed in sparkly tights and a T-shirt screen-printed with an image of Ilya licking Shane’s face. She describes herself as “addicted” to the show. She was in Europe when it started streaming; during a layover at Sea-Tac on the way home, she tucked herself into a corner and watched the first episode on her laptop. “A wild choice in public,” she says. She’s since rewatched multiple times. “I think I’m in double digits [for] episodes five and six,” she says.

The fire has caught across the city. Pairings Portland, the quirky Kerns wine shop, is serving a nine-wine flight January 16–18 (“Expect a progression that mirrors the story’s arc: competitive, charged with undeniable chemistry, and celebratory”), and no fewer than five dance parties dot the calendar in the coming weeks. Count ’em: January 15 at Peacock, January 24 at the Den, January 31 at Sanctuary, February 5 at the Get Down, and February 7 at Nova PDX. (The Crystal Ballroom has one booked all the way on April 3.) No watch parties have popped up, but not for lack of trying: A Reddit user posted a screenshot of a message they’d received from the all-ages Sports Bra, which declined a watch party request due to the show’s “frequency in mature content.”

Charlie Krouse is behind the party at Peacock, the queer bar that opened in the former Crush space in October. Krouse runs a group called Queer Cute, which over the past two years has produced a gamut of events: speed dating, strip spelling bees, a mass wedding, a Bachelor riff called The Butchelor. An evil femme competition is upcoming. A dance party was never on Krouse’s dance card—in fact, they see their events as more interactive alternatives to dance parties. But Heated Rivalry wrecked them. “I went into, like, a Heated Rivalry psychosis,” they say. In the throes, they posted an Instagram story on the Queer Cute account. “I was like, Hi, I need a Heated Rivalry dance party right now. Within three minutes of posting, 20 people reached out to me and said, ‘Run it.’”

The party sold out in six hours. (Fifty additional tickets will be available at the door.) “People are hungry,” Krouse says. The event has come together practically on its own. DJ Lynx DeMuth reached out, offering a good rate and promising snippets of dialogue mixed amid the show’s needle-drop bangers. Then drag performer Miss Jaxon “graciously offered and demanded to do a performance,” Krouse says. The show will screen sans sound on one wall, and there will be glowsticks, themed cocktails, and a roving photographer snapping Polaroids. Krouse had hoped to find shoulder pads to wear—“I don’t doubt some folks will be showing up with them,” they say—but has settled for a Wayne Gretzky jersey. (I’m thinking black tank.)

What’s behind the hunger? For Kate, the school counselor, it’s that the show gets the romance genre right, committing to both smut and big feelings. “Jacob Tierney took it seriously,” she says. “He shows sex and emotion.” Indeed, Heated Rivalry gives sex its due, understanding physical intimacy as ground for relationship development. Some of the show’s sex scenes play from nearly beginning to end in real time, and we watch as dynamics shift from encounter to encounter. We see the characters tentative, firm, a little kinky, playful. As in real life, good sex furthers the plot.

For Krouse, the show gives a shot of “queer joy dopamine” in a time of ongoing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and extremism. It doesn’t hurt that its stars, 25-year-old Storrie and 24-year-old Williams, have handled their overnight fame with grace, goofiness, and indomitable charm. (Behold their Teen Vogue compliment battle.) Unknown in November, the two are suddenly seemingly everywhere, doing backyard handsprings and presenting Golden Globes and, perhaps most significantly, showing physical affection in ways we almost never see in platonic male friendships.

And even as the show challenges hockey’s hypermasculine culture, it’s caught on among (straight) fans of the sport. Brothers and former hockey players Dan and Chris Powers recapped episodes with absolute glee on their hockey podcast Empty Netters and live streamed their reactions to the season finale. The National Hockey League has no current or former players who’ve come out as queer. Now the little Canadian show that could is sparking conversation about a potential culture change.

Back at the Nest, play begins. Giles asks for Scott Hunter’s smoothie order, the location of the 2008 Prospect Cup, Ilya’s room number after the all-star game. “We’re gonna shout it together!” Giles yells at the answer reveal. “One-two-two-one!” the room hollers back. What are Storrie’s and Williams’s zodiac signs? What was Storrie’s YouTube username at age 12? Name the show’s fictional hockey podcast, its fictional Montreal nightclub, the youngest child of Shane’s teammate Hayden. “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u. plays as points are tallied, and people scream-sing and bang their heads.

It’s a three-way tie, Giles announces. Hubbub! Each team selects a representative. I see Kate walk to the front. Of course it’s her; she read Reid’s book series before it was adapted for the screen. Giles is ready: “I need you to tell me, down to the second, when we see both butts in episode 1.” Chatter erupts. Players near me whisper their thoughts: 17 minutes, three minutes. Mr. Real Estate takes the win with a guess of 13:13, just 37 seconds off the correct answer of 13:50.

I start to make my way across the room, hoping to catch David Hollander’s Charger before they leave, but I’m swept into Mr. Real Estate’s victory party. Team members hug and cheer. I congratulate them, and they ask me to take their photo. Someone hands me a phone and I back up a step, then watch as their grins fill the screen. They look like they just won the Cup.