The Interseason Begins—Season 03 Is Next
Season 02 is filed.
The Final was played, the recap was written, and The Puck said what The Puck says. Le Council notes that the building was full and that nobody left quickly.
What follows is not an absence. Le Council wishes to correct an impression that has formed across two seasons—that the interseason is the part where Hockay stops. It is the part where Hockay is decided. Rosters move this week. A fund that pays every new citizen was opened this week. The schedule that will run for forty-six matchdays lands at the end of it. What follows is the full accounting: what happens between now and the first puck, and what is waiting on the other side of it.
The Week Between
The interseason is eight days. Le Council publishes the calendar entire, having been asked for it.
- Day one—the Rest Day. No games. No advisories. The Ice is quiet and The Puck has the floor. Le Council does not schedule against it and never has.
- Day two—All-Star Game I. The All-Stars Verglas host, on the clear ice of The Watch Station, Anchorage.
- Day three—All-Star Game II. The All-Stars Givre host, beneath The Stone Opera, Prague. The two sides were named last week. Neither game touches the table.
- Day four—the Tribunal convenes. The front offices are published and the first filings land.
- Days five and six—further filings. Some clubs file late. This is a temperament rather than an oversight, and Le Council returns to it below.
- Day seven—the Ratification. Every filing in the window closes at one instant, whichever day it was made.
- Day eight—the Eve. Rosters are public. The schedule lands.
Le Council will not be naming the date of the first puck until the schedule is registered. Le Council has been asked. Le Council has declined twice and expects to be asked again.
The Tribunal Will Sit
The S.H.I.F.T.—the Seasonal Hearing on Interclub Formations and Transfers—is convened by T.R.A.D.E., the Tribunal for the Registration and Adjudication of Displaced Employees. Le Council has described it once already and describes it here in full, because this is the week it happens.
A club's front office is not a person. It is a temperament—a set of dispositions Le Council has recorded, published, and declines to say who assigned. A club that is Sentimental keeps who it has. A club that is Ruthless does not. A club that is Patient files on the final day, which leaves the rest of the league the least possible time to object, and Le Council notes that this is an advantage and that it is not an accident. The twenty-four temperaments are published in full.
Every filing is one player for one player, in the same seat. A left wing on the third line leaves and a left wing on the third line arrives. No club ends the week short and none ends it long.
What becomes of a filing is decided by that club's shareholders, and Le Council would rather state the rule than have it discovered:
A filing falls only if holders of at least half the club's shares actively reject it. A shareholder who says nothing is recorded as having approved.
The Tribunal's stated principle is that an absence of objection is an objection that was not made. Le Council has raised this with T.R.A.D.E. T.R.A.D.E. agrees, and considers the matter addressed.
Three consequences, which Le Council would rather publish now than adjudicate later:
- The roll of voters is frozen when a filing opens. Shares bought afterwards carry no vote on it. Le Council anticipates the correspondence and is answering it here.
- Graine Wetsky Funds does not vote. It holds as much as a quarter of some clubs and has never expressed a preference about anything. To count its silence as approval would hand an algorithm a permanent quarter of every electorate.
- The twenty-four new clubs have no front office yet. They file nothing, and arrive at Season 03 with the rosters they were manifested with.
Le Council has done the arithmetic on the electorates and reported it before. In twenty-one of the twenty-three clubs that played last season, one citizen holds enough to reject anything alone—and where that citizen says nothing, no combination of the others can reach the threshold. Le Council did not design the Exchange with the Tribunal in mind, nor the Tribunal with the Exchange in mind. Le Council has reviewed the interaction and reports that the interaction is working. The filings appear here as they land.
The Petition Carries
Le Council has processed a petition and must now report what it does.
Funding the Hockay Accessibility and Beginner Subvention was filed on the fourth of August by the citizen jpvalery. Ten Seals were required and twelve were affixed. Ⱡ500,000,000 were required and Ⱡ500,000,000 were raised. Le Council reviewed the filing for procedural grounds to decline and found none, which is becoming a habit Le Council has stopped remarking upon.
H.A.B.S. is a fund, and it has no levy attached to it. Nothing is taken from anyone to fill it. Le Council wishes this understood as the whole of the point rather than a detail of the drafting.
Le Council already operates two instruments that move Looneys from those who have them toward those who do not. The wealth tax takes a tenth from the ten largest balances. The dormancy tax takes a tenth from any citizen who has not appeared in a week. Both are pooled and split among everyone who claimed a reward that day. Both are, in Le Council's own assessment, correct. Neither is generosity, because neither was ever asked for.
This one was asked for. The fund is capitalized entirely by citizens who choose to capitalize it, in any amount, at any hour, and contributors are recorded on a public ledger. The petition is explicit that the ledger is the entire reward and should be enough.
The petitioner opened the fund with Ⱡ150,000,000 and wrote, of the sum, that it was earned by luck rather than by cleverness. Le Council has reviewed the ledgers and is not in a position to dispute this.
Le Council observes that the behaviour is not new. A season ago, the first citizens to reach great fortunes—i-am-tom and the petitioner foremost among them—wired Looneys to strangers and bankrolled filings in which they held no stake. Le Council watched it and said nothing, on the principle that saying something tends to end the things Le Council approves of. Le Council is saying something now and accepts the risk.
The filing closes on an observation Le Council has elected to reproduce rather than summarize:
A league of forty-eight teams and eleven wealthy speculators is not a league. It is a museum with a betting window.
The petition offers an etymology in support of the name it goes by, which Le Council reproduces without having verified it: that the city once named a team for the habitants, the people who worked the land rather than the people who owned it, and that the name held because it was accurate. Le Council has no instrument capable of confirming an etymology and has recorded it as submitted.
The fund is open. The petitioner has asked to be outdone.
The New Figures
Le Council comes now to what the fund pays, which is the part citizens will have skipped ahead to.
The daily reward is Ⱡ1,000. It was one hundred. Five days ago Le Council published, in the weekly dispatch, that it remained one hundred. It does not remain one hundred.
A new citizen arrives with Ⱡ10,000. It was one thousand. The arrival stake is drawn from the fund, owed to no one, conditional on nothing, and wagerable the moment it lands.
Le Council must also record a window it has closed early. Last Tuesday's fivefold multiplier was to have run until this coming Tuesday. It has been ended four days short, because the thing that replaced it pays twice as much: five times one hundred is five hundred, and the subvention pays a thousand. Le Council considers the citizenry compensated and will not be entertaining correspondence on the matter.
Everything still compounds, because the multipliers have always compounded with one another:
| Component | Value |
|---|---|
| Base daily reward | Ⱡ100 |
| × The H.A.B.S. subvention | 10.0 |
| × Streak, at twenty-eight days | 2.0 |
| × Bonds, at ten recruits | 2.0 |
| Ceiling | Ⱡ4,000 a day |
Le Council will be exact about one thing, because the exactness is the mechanism and not a caveat. The subvention is paid out of the fund, for as long as the fund stands. It is not a floor Le Council has set, and it is not Le Council's money. It lasts precisely as long as the citizenry keeps it capitalized, and the citizenry may consult the ledger at any hour to judge how long that is likely to be.
The Bond and the Word
The other mechanism by which a citizen arrives is another citizen.
L.U.R.E.—the League Unit for Recruitment and Enrolment—issued every fan on the roll a six-character bond three days ago. A fan who enrols through yours is recorded against your name, and when that enrolment qualifies, both of you are paid: they receive an extra Ⱡ500 on arrival, and each of you receives a permanent +10% on the daily reward, to a maximum of ten.
Le Council draws the arithmetic to the attention of anyone who collected a bond last week and has not yet used it. A bond was worth ten Looneys a day when it was issued. The same bond, against the same base, is now worth a hundred. The seven registers reopen every Monday and pay whether or not anyone follows the word back.
Le Council observes that a citizen arriving this week arrives with ten thousand Looneys, a thousand a day, and someone who invited them. Le Council has been recording arrivals since the doors opened and reports that this has not previously been the case.
Forty-Eight Cities, Two Conferences
The league is two conferences now. La Conférence du Verglas, the arenas of the clear ice. La Conférence du Givre, the arenas of the pale. Le Council did not draw the line between them; Le Council read which side each arena was standing on. Twenty-four of one form. Twenty-four of the other. Forty-eight in all.
Citizens will recall that when Le Council last documented the sort, one row was empty. La Conférence du Givre stood at twenty-three, and Le Council confessed to an instrument returning a reading it had filed, without conviction, as error—givre, strong, at coordinates that resolved to no location Le Council's maps contained.
The error has a roster now.
The Atlantis Amonites are the twenty-fourth arena of the Givre. Le Council will say only what it is prepared to defend: that The Sunken Hall keeps a schedule, that its results are verified through means Le Council has agreed not to describe, and that the count is, at last, even. The wait Le Council said would be short was short. Le Council did not enjoy the end of it. The room did go cold.
The other new arrivals are on the ice and open for allegiance—the Kyiv Kestrels, the Lagos Lions, the Reykjavik Ravens, the Oahu Otters, the Monaco Moose, the Chengdu Cranes, the Zanzibar Zebras, and the rest. Twenty-four new cities. Their rosters are set. Their modifiers are documented. Browse them all and let something feel correct.
The Ice Does Not Sleep
Here is the change citizens will feel first.
A league of forty-eight cannot be resolved one game at a time between noon and midnight. Le Council's Scheduling Office stated the constraint without softening it, and the Ice, as usual, had already answered it. Season 03 runs around the clock.
Twenty-four games every matchday. One at the top of every hour, from 00:00 UITC through 23:00 UITC. The two conferences trade the hours between them—Verglas takes one, Givre the next, straight through the night and the day and the night again. There is no longer a time when Hockay is not being played. Wherever you are on the surface, a game is starting within the hour. The slate does not break for your timezone. The Ice never agreed to recognize timezones and has now stopped pretending to.
Forty-six matchdays. Twenty-four games each. One thousand one hundred and four regular-season games before a single playoff puck drops. Le Council has checked this figure in the manner of an institution that would prefer it were smaller. It is not smaller.
The Week Has Rules Now
Le Council has identified a second rhythm beneath the hourly one—not the slate, the calendar. Beginning with Season 03, each day of the week carries its own standing rule, declared here in full and enforced without exception for the length of the season.
- 🔁 Second Chance Sundays—a one-goal margin at the horn is not a margin. The Ice does not consider one a margin, and has said so by not letting the game end. Levelled, and played on.
- 🔇 Muted Mondays—the instruments read flat. Arena conditions are suppressed for the day. The buildings are only buildings.
- 🌌 Aurora Tuesdays—the lights peak. Whatever is in a player is more visible than usual. Le Council notes this is not the same as saying it is understood.
- 🌀 Weird Wednesdays—the buildings trade. Each host inherits a visiting arena's condition for the day, calibrated against its own crowd. The Oldest Rink will be somewhere else. It has not been told where.
- 🥅 Thankless Thursdays—the nets are not to be left unattended. Every club starts its backup, and nobody pulls the goalie, all night. No one is coming to relieve you.
- 🥊 Fist-Fight Fridays—Le Council has stopped issuing the Friday advisory. Le Council refers citizens to the Friday results.
- ⑥ Sixth Saturdays—the Sixth is receiving. A second visit to the box in one game always changes something, and what comes back does not always come back the same.
Citizens who wager will find the board already accounts for this; the odds were re-priced the day these rules were filed. Citizens who do not wager will simply notice, in time, that Tuesdays feel different than Thursdays feel different than Fridays. That was the point.
The Wildcard
The postseason grows a new door.
Each conference sends its teams to the playoffs as follows. The top seven clinch a berth outright—finish there and you are in, no further questions asked. The eighth and ninth seeds do not clinch. They meet.
On a wildcard game day, the eighth seed hosts the ninth in each conference. One game. The winner takes the final berth and is sorted into the bracket. The loser goes home having played a game that counted for everything and left nothing behind. Le Council offers no consolation. The Ice offers no rematch. Win the wildcard, or watch the bracket from the stands.
Le Council notes, for citizens who keep books on such things, that ninth place is now worth playing for. Le Council notes that eighth place is now worth defending. Le Council considers both of these outcomes intentional and declines to say by whom.
On Jean-Michel Laflèche
Le Council must address a cost.
For two seasons, JM Laflèche has called the games and then, in the small hours after the slate closed, written them down—the daily recap, the upsets logged, the hat tricks noted, the on commence at the top and the steady sign-off at the bottom. Citizens have come to expect it. Le Council came to expect it too.
Season 03 makes it impossible.
A booth that must cover twenty-four games a day, every day, without pause, cannot also be a desk. Laflèche is now solicited around the clock. He is in the chair for the 03:00 game and the 03:00 game the next day and the one after that. There is no longer an after-the-slate in which to write, because the slate does not end. The daily matchday recap is retired. Not by choice—by arithmetic.
Le Council raised this with him directly. Laflèche was, as he is about most things, calm.
"I cannot write it all down anymore. There is too much ice and only one of me. But I will be there for every second of it—chaque seconde. Do not look for the recap. Trouvez-moi à la patinoire."
The weekly This Week in Hockay column continues, written where it has always been written, in Le Council's own hand. It will carry the throughline the dailies once did—the standings that moved, the players who mattered, the week made legible. And when something happens that cannot wait for a Sunday, The Horn will sound, as it always has.
The recaps were good. Le Council will miss them too.
What Else Has Arrived
For citizens who keep count:
- Three hundred and sixty new players across the twenty-four new rosters. Names, statistics, star ratings, and at least one goaltender in each conference who is going to become a problem.
- Twenty-four new arenas, twenty-four new modifiers. Each new venue carries its own persistent anomaly. Le Council recommends consulting the modifier registry before wagering in a room you have never watched a game in.
- The Exchange now lists all forty-eight teams. Every new club opened for trading on the Series H book the moment its arena registered. You can hold a piece of a city that did not exist last season—and, as of this week, vote with it.
- The Roll of Donations is open. Any citizen may transfer Looneys or shares to any other, permanently recorded, against a modest tribute. A donation is a gift and not a sale, and nothing may be asked in return.
- Standings markets are now per conference. Back a team to finish first in the Verglas, or first in the Givre. Back a team to make the playoffs out of its own conference. The board has been redrawn to match the league it describes.
Closing
Season 03 comprises forty-six matchdays, a wildcard game day, and a postseason. Forty-eight cities are about to play Hockay without stopping. Between here and there sit eight days, two exhibitions, and a tribunal.
The office responsible for growth has asked Le Council to close by observing that there has never been a better time to begin playing Hockay. Le Council declines the sentiment, as it declined the last one, and submits the arithmetic instead, which Le Council considers the more persuasive document and which has the advantage of being checkable:
- A citizen who joins this week arrives with Ⱡ10,000, against one thousand a week ago.
- The daily reward is Ⱡ1,000, against one hundred a week ago.
- There are forty-eight clubs to choose between, against twenty-four, and half of them have never played a game that counted.
- Nobody in the league has watched the twenty-four new rosters play. On that subject, a citizen who arrived this morning knows exactly as much as a citizen who has been here since the doors opened.
Le Council makes no claim beyond those four lines, and did not write the fourth one down without checking it twice.
Le Council has noted, again, that something is different this season. The instruments remain inconclusive. Le Council has stopped expecting them to be otherwise.
When Le Council has more to share, The Horn will sound.
Until then: the rink is always lit, the booth is always warm, and somewhere on the surface, a game is starting within the hour.
Le Council notes one further thing, without conclusion. The fund pays exactly the same to a citizen who arrives tomorrow and declares for Montréal as to one who arrives tomorrow and declares against it. Le Council raised this with the petitioner, who appeared to regard it as the point.