As a hockey fan, Heated Rivalry has genuinely changed how I view the sport and how I see others engaging with it. The show goes beyond goals and final scores; it offers a deeper look into the emotions, tensions, and personal stories that define hockey rivalries. This helps audiences understand that rivalry is not just about conflict. It’s about passion, pride, and identity.
What Heated Rivalry does particularly well is humanize the sport. By focusing on players, coaches, and fan bases, the show reveals the dedication and sacrifice behind high-pressure games. For long-time fans, this adds context and appreciation to moments we already care about. For newer or casual viewers, it makes hockey more accessible by showing that the sport is driven by people, not just competition.
The show has also shifted how hockey is perceived more broadly. By presenting rivalries as intense but meaningful, Heated Rivalry challenges the idea that hockey is only about aggression or hostility. Instead, it frames rivalry as a source of motivation and excellence, where competition pushes everyone involved to perform at their best. This balanced portrayal encourages respect for the sport rather than reinforcing negative stereotypes.
From a fan's perspective, the show has strengthened the sense of community around hockey. It sparks conversation, debate, and shared excitement both online and offline. Watching Heated Rivalry feels like being part of something bigger than a single game; it connects history, emotion, and modern sport storytelling.
The show has positively influenced how people view hockey. It celebrates intensity while promoting understanding, making the sport feel richer, more inclusive, and more compelling than ever.
As many are saying, Heated Rivalry was made with ten cents and a dream. The show has skyrocketed itself and its actors to fame, landing them in places never thought possible such as carrying the Olympic torch in the three months since the show released. It has profoundly changed how brands market, showing that powerful and niche fanbases are strong enough, and present enough to drive global success.
The show’s success provided many with an intense emotional connection that stemmed from using the unknown. Fresh faces like Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie are refreshing and revitalising our screens, with relatively unknown and underground music providing emotional association that would be impossible to manufacture with any sort of mainstream artist.
Fans were encouraged to create and be involved throughout the entire process. Releasing episodically, the entire community was growing and promoting in real time as opposed to the clinical and polished approach to promotion used by big broadcasting names such as Netflix and Prime Video these days. The entire community of Heated Rivalry fans took the show and made space for it in their hearts, the likes of which we haven’t seen since we were young. The message is so important, and has given so many people the opportunity to see themsleves represented, with Williams and Storrie being rightfully praised for their performances and skyrocketed to global recognition for their authenticity.
Yuna Hollander would be proud.
For years, sport has worried about how to attract new audiences. Falling attendance figures, declining TV numbers among young people, and growing disengagement from traditional fandom have all fuelled the same concern: sport is losing its relevance. But the rise of sports romance, like Heated Rivalry and celebrity crossovers, suggests a different problem altogether. Sport isn’t being rejected, it’s being renegotiated.
Sports romance, and wider pop-culture entry points into sport, function as a gateway rather than a conversion tool. Rather than suddenly producing die-hard fans invested in tactics or league tables, they invite new audiences to engage with sport through story, intimacy, and identity. These narratives centre relationships, vulnerability, and belonging, values that have long been marginalised in hyper-masculine sporting cultures. For those who have felt excluded by laddish, misogyny, or rigid gender norms, sports romance reframes sport as something human rather than hostile.
This creates an uncomfortable but necessary question for sporting institutions: can sport adapt without diluting its identity? Inclusion cannot simply be a marketing exercise designed to capitalise on new audiences while leaving entrenched cultural problems untouched. If sports romance resonates because it presents a vision of sport that feels safer, emotionally literate, and community-driven, then sport itself must confront why that version feels so distant from many people’s lived experiences.
The growing engagement of so-called “sports haters”, particularly young women, should not be viewed as a threat to sport’s integrity. Instead, it offers an opportunity to rethink what fandom and participation can look like. Not everyone wants to shout abuse from the stands or argue over VAR decisions on social media. Some want connection, representation, and a sense that sport has space for them too.
If sport is willing to centre community over gatekeeping, and inclusion over tradition for tradition’s sake, it may discover something important: these new audiences were never anti-sport at all. They were simply waiting to see themselves reflected in it.
With increased attendance at NHL games in America, and an interest in the sport spiking internationally, the power of inclusivity and diverse storytelling is a refreshing reminder to some of how sport could and should be played fairly. Reid wrote the book off the back of a continued wave of being uncomfortable with the often hypermasculine attitude that the sport exudes. In the non-fiction reality, for sports like ice hockey, part of this hypermasculinity often results in rife homophobia. With Luke Prokop being recognised as the first gay hockey player coming out only in July 2021, it seemed fair to say that there is still some time to go before there is genuine acceptance of queer players being accepted in sport.
That was until the release of Heated Rivalry. Its depiction of a genuine environment that lets the relationship between queerness and sport thrive, beyond its romantic setting, seems to have inspired a new wave of change in the community.
Almost immediately after the show's release, hockey player Jesse Kortuem, found the inspiration he spent the last two decades looking for and came out as gay. After feeling like he had to ‘edit’ himself to play hockey, he speaks proudly of his experience since the show's release: “I’m just so grateful for where my life has ended up…”. Heated Rivalry is a Canadian show, depicting the North American sport, so it seems hard to imagine a culture so far removed from Newcastle having any impact here, however, the multitude of clubs in the local area tell a different story, reflecting the same hope that the show has introduced.
While sport romance has grown increasingly popular as of recent, the show has grown beyond the traditional style guide. Of course, it still remains escapism but a popular show with a positive attitude towards gay athletes can only do good.