The Eve Ends at Midnight

Day eight. Le Council named it the Eve a week ago and declines to rename it now that it has arrived.

Rosters are public. The Tribunal's window closed and what survived it is on the books. The schedule is registered. There is nothing left between here and the first puck except the hour it takes to get there.

Season 03 begins at 00:00 UTC. Panama Pangolins host Busan Blizzards at The Lock, first of twenty-four games on the day and the first of one thousand, one hundred and four before a single playoff puck drops. Le Council will not pretend to know why the Pangolins were given the honor of going first. The schedule was drawn without Le Council's hand in it, same as always.

What's Different, Briefly

Le Council covered this in full a week ago and will not repeat itself at length tonight. For citizens arriving late, or returning for the first time since the doors were twenty-four cities smaller, the shape of it:

Forty-eight teams, two conferences. La Conférence du Verglas and La Conférence du Givre, twenty-four apiece. Browse them all.
The Ice does not sleep. Twenty-four games a day, one at the top of every hour, straight through. There is no longer an hour of the day when Hockay is not being played.
The week has rules now. Second Chance Sundays. Muted Mondays. Aurora Tuesdays. Weird Wednesdays. Thankless Thursdays. Fist-Fight Fridays. Sixth Saturdays. Each stands for the length of the season, without exception. The full accounting is on record.
The wildcard door. Top seven in each conference clinch outright. Who meets for the last seat is no longer arithmetic. More on this below—it changed tonight.

Where the Recap Went

One thing was left open last week. JM Laflèche cannot write a daily column for a slate that never ends—Le Council said so plainly and Laflèche did not argue the point. What Le Council did not say last week is what fills the space.

Matchday recaps are live. Every day's slate, read straight out of the record the moment it's played: final scores, every goal, every fight, everything that came back different from The Sixth. Not written—compiled. JM is still in the booth for chaque seconde, as promised. The page just no longer waits on him to sit down and remember it. Find it here, a matchday at a time, starting tomorrow.

The Wildcard, Revised

Le Council must revise something it published a week ago, with less notice than Le Council would prefer.

Last week Le Council described the wildcard as a fixture: eighth hosts ninth, winner takes the last seat, and the two names in that game would be whoever the standings put there. That description does not survive tonight's instruments.

The seat is drawn. Not seeded—drawn. When the top seven in each conference are set, the two teams that meet for the last berth will not simply be whichever finished eighth and ninth. They will be whoever the Ice selects from the field still standing, by a method Le Council is not in a position to publish. Le Council reviewed its own numbers before writing that sentence and is not fully certain the method is fixed, either.

Finishing eighth will not save a team. Finishing lower will not necessarily cost one. Le Council recommends citizens stop treating ninth place as the line that matters and start treating the whole scramble behind the top seven as what it now appears to be: a lottery with an unpublished number of tickets.

The game itself is unchanged. One game. Winner takes the seat. Loser goes home. Only who is standing on the ice when it is played is no longer something the standings table can tell you in advance.

Le Council apologizes for the lateness of the correction. The Ice did not consult Le Council's publishing schedule. Le Council has stopped expecting that it will start.

Before the Puck Drops

The betting board has been re-priced for a forty-eight-team, two-conference league since the switch was announced. Standings markets now run per conference. The wildcard market is being withdrawn and redrafted in light of the correction above—Le Council will not price a seat it cannot yet describe the odds of. It returns once O.D.D.S. has something honest to say about a draw. Le Council notes, again, that a citizen placing a bet tonight is betting on twenty-four rosters nobody in the league has watched play a game that counted.

Nobody has an edge on that. Not the citizen who has been here since the doors opened. Not Le Council.

Closing

Forty-six matchdays. Twenty-four games a day. A wildcard game day at the far end of it, and a postseason after that. Le Council will not pretend to know how any of it resolves—the whole point of tonight is that nobody does yet.

At 00:00 UTC, the first puck of Season 03 drops at The Lock. Twenty-three more follow it today, one at the top of every hour, across every timezone the league has ever played in and a few it hasn't. It does not stop from there.

When Le Council has more to share, The Horn will sound.

Until then: the rink is always lit, the ice is always running, and somewhere on the surface, a game is starting within the hour.

Stick around.