Late November last year, my Instagram feed was flooded with hundreds of video edits of Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander. I had no idea what it was all about. But I was intrigued. I was curious why a Canadian gay hockey romance has had the entire internet in a chokehold. I saw the appeal. I could feel the chemistry radiating through my mobile screen, and I was seated. So when Heated Rivalry finally made its way to India last week, I started the show on a whim and finished in a single sitting. Jacob Tierney’s show has done something to me that I cannot fully explain.Heated Rivalry, which premiered on Crave and HBO Max in late November 2025, follows Hollander and Rozanov, two of the biggest stars in professional hockey, who begin a secret relationship that spans nearly a decade, playing for rival teams, chasing trophies, chasing each other. It is, on paper, a gay sports romance adapted from Rachel Reid’s Game Changer series. But it has become one of the biggest television events of the year — made on a shoestring budget by a small production house, it came out of nowhere and refuses to leave.AdvertisementThe question everyone keeps asking, the one that keeps showing up in comment sections and group chats and, honestly, in my own head, is: Why are women — straight women — so obsessed with this show? The answer, I think, is one word. Yearning.We’ve been here before, kind of. When Season 2 of Bridgerton came out, everyone went a little feral over Anthony Bridgerton and the way he yearned and obsessed over Kate Sharma. Mr Darcy and his hand twitch have occupied the throne of yearning since the 2005 movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice hit our screens. There is something deeply, almost embarrassingly, universal about watching two people who clearly belong together refuse to admit it for as long as humanly possible. The push and pull. The almost-moments. The brushing of hands. The thing left unsaid in the middle of a sentence that ends too quickly. That is the engine of romantic fiction.What Heated Rivalry does is take that engine and put it in a body that few, if any, imagined containing it. Hollander and Rozanov are not meant to be tender. They are athletes. They are rivals. They are men trained by an industry that celebrates toughness and punishes softness. And yet. There is a scene in episode five — a phone call between Rozanov and Hollander, after the former loses his father. Rozanov — tender from the loss of his father, a fight with his brother, and the weight of all the expectations and responsibilities — bares his heart out to Hollander in Russian, sitting in an alleyway. On the other end, Hollander listens to him, giving him the safety and the space to let it out. In verbalising his frustration, Rozanov, who has always been the “nonchalant” one in the relationship, confesses his feelings, his love. That moment is so tender and so honest, you can’t help but melt and shed a few tears.AdvertisementThe show understands that restraint is a language of its own. That what a person doesn’t do tells you a lot about them. Sometimes, more than what their words could. This is what women who have grown up reading romance novels, watching period dramas and rewatching the adaptations of Pride and Prejudice frame by frame resonate with. The yearning in Heated Rivalry is not decorative. What truly sets the show apart is its patience. It does not rush to give you what you want. It makes you sit with the tension. The way any good slow-burn novel makes you read the same paragraph twice just to stay in it a little longer.And hockey, the setting itself, turns out to be a genius container for all of this. Think about it structurally. The rink is a closed world. It has its own rules, hierarchy and language. In many ways, it acts as a mirror to any institution that demands a certain performance of identity from the people inside it. A school, a corporation, a society. Rozanov and Hollander cannot simply be who they are. They have to be what the game expects of them. And that gap between the public performance and the private reality is where the entire story lives.The love story in Heated Rivalry is free from certain heteronormative scripts that usually burden the male-female romances on screen. There is no easy fallback into gendered expectations. Both men must articulate their fear; both must risk softness. The emotional labour is shared. The desire is mutual, non-hierarchical.For many straight women, it is cathartic to watch two men painstakingly learn the language of feeling. They do make mistakes, but they are honest; they can feel. Emotional vulnerability never goes out of style. It is not about exclusion; it is about witnessing masculinity unarmoured. The show, in a way, offers a fantasy of reciprocity that many straight women desire and want from their partners. They are just vicariously living through Rozanov and Hollander.In the Indian context, this deepens the resonance. We are a culture where love is still most often negotiated through family structures, where public displays of affection are looked down upon and can invite scrutiny, and where queerness, despite being legally decriminalised, remains socially fraught. The recent wave of mainstream commercial urban web series or movies in India featuring queer characters has often oscillated between caricature and caution. Heated Rivalry, in contrast, treats its romance not as a “social issue” but as an epic emotional saga.The books had already developed a rabid following, which means that there was a fandom that was already primed. But the show earned its audience beyond that base. Hudson Williams’s portrayal of Hollander as autistic is handled with care and respect. He’s allowed to be complex, awkward, strong, and vulnerable, all at once. Connor Storrie, on the other hand, plays Rozanov with a kind of controlled chaos that makes you feel the mischief he is brewing in his mind. Their chemistry is such that it could set a room on fire.you may likeI think what straight women are responding to, ultimately, is not the fact that this is a “gay” love story. It is the fact that this is a love story about two people who have been told, in a hundred different ways, that who they are is inconvenient. And watching them choose each other anyway, slowly, imperfectly, at enormous cost, is not a niche experience. That is the oldest story there is.Jane Austen knew it. Rachel Reid knew it. And now, apparently, so does everyone who is still at the cottage, for the next season to arrive sooner, rewatching the episodes.The writer is trainee journalist, The Indian Express. anusree.kc@expressindia.com