SLOANE
The assignment landed like a puck on fresh ice—clean, unexpected, impossible to ignore.
I’d been running *Cold Read* for two years. Started it at sixteen in the summer after Mom died—mostly a place to dump the game breakdowns that had nowhere else to go. Dad’s old Flyers connections had gotten me guest access to a couple minor-league press boxes. I’d scraped together three thousand followers who actually cared about zone entries and forecheck systems and why analytics still got ignored in favor of “gut feel.”
It wasn’t huge.
But it was mine.
Tuesday morning my editor—if you could call a twenty-four-year-old analytics-site runner who paid in exposure and the occasional twenty-dollar Starbucks card an “editor”—emailed.
**FROM:** Derek Paulson
**TO:** Sloane Winters
**SUB
