The Graham Effect

Six years before the main story, fifteen-year-old Gigi arrives early at her father Garrett Graham's youth hockey camp, skating alone on pristine ice.

Six years before the main story, fifteen-year-old Gigi arrives early at her father Garrett Graham's youth hockey camp, skating alone on pristine ice. A lanky teenage stranger named Ryder storms on, insists she doesn't belong, and calls her prom queen, assuming she's a figure skater. Gigi retaliates by performing spins directly in his path, refusing to identify herself. When Garrett walks in and she calls him Dad, Ryder's smugness collapses. She cheerfully informs him she plays hockey and will be running his shooting drills today. The antagonistic spark between hockey royalty's daughter and the cocky kid from nowhere ignites—and neither of them will forget it for years.

Two hockey programs merge, and a fistfight christens the union

Eastwood College has shuttered, and its men's hockey program is absorbed into Briar University—forcing decades-old rivals to share one roster under Coach Chad Jensen. Gigi, a junior forward on Briar's women's team and daughter of hockey legend Garrett Graham, watches the men's first practice from the stands with teammates Whitney and Camila. Within minutes, a brawl erupts between Briar's loudmouth Trager and Eastwood's hotheaded Rand. Ryder—now a chiseled six-foot-five junior she hasn't seen since youth camp—steps between them. Jensen ends practice in disgust and demands cocaptains be nominated. Each faction picks their best player as a territorial statement: Case Colson for Briar, Ryder for Eastwood. Neither man wants the title. Both are stuck with it.

Ryder trades hockey coaching for a word with Garrett Graham

After Ryder shows up at Gigi's exhibition game and bluntly catalogs her weaknesses behind the net—echoing criticisms from Team USA's new head coach Brad Fairlee—she's livid. Worse, he admits he came to lobby for a coveted summer coaching slot at Garrett's Hockey Kings camp. She storms off. Days later, he appears at her dorm with a crumpled bouquet of daisies stolen from a neighbor's planter. He acknowledges the nepotism jab was out of line and calls her game phenomenal. Gigi proposes a trade: he coaches her behind-the-net play through private sessions at a rink owned by her family friend, and she talks him up to her father. He agrees. Their after-hours arrangement begins, with his teammate Beckett Dunne assisting the drills.

Ryder describes what he'd do to her, then doesn't Briar's PR department sends Gigi and Ryder to a charity gala to schmooze boosters—she handles all the talking while he radiates silent menace. Exhausted from being her father's proxy, she begs for five minutes of quiet. Ryder takes her hand and pulls her behind the stage curtain into darkness. Scant inches apart, enveloped in his…