May arrived with graduation looming at the end of it, a fact that felt both entirely earned and slightly surreal to Cole, who'd spent four years so singularly focused on hockey that the actual degree — sports management, a major he'd chosen mostly because it fit around practice schedules — had become almost an afterthought to the season that consumed it.
The draft rankings updated weekly now, a ritual Cole had once obsessed over with a kind of anxious precision that bordered on unhealthy, refreshing scouting sites at midnight, parsing every mock draft for movement in his projected slot. He still checked them. He wasn't pretending the outcome didn't matter — it mattered enormously, the culmination of everything he'd worked for since he was six years old on a frozen pond with his father sho
