The Winners: A Novel (Beartown Series) by Fredrik Backman

Author:Fredrik Backman [Backman, Fredrik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-09-26T18:30:00+00:00

52 Moments

Everyone needs to feel needed. For some people that’s as important as desire and admiration and love. For others, particularly those who have devoted their whole lives to a team sport, it’s more important than any-thing.

“Nice speech!” the old man says, shaking Peter’s hand after the funeral.

There’s a long line of other old men behind him who want to say the same thing. Everyone wants to shake hands, wants to talk a bit of hockey, several of them want to tell him that they miss him on the management team at Beartown Hockey and hope he can take Ramona’s seat on the committee now. Peter doesn’t know how to laugh that off, it’s such a ridiculous idea, but like all ridiculous ideas it has a tendency to seem less ridiculous the more times you hear it.

“There’s only number crunchers and analysts and shit like that everywhere in hockey these days, without people like you and Ramona there won’t be any heart left in it! You win hockey on the ice, the way it was in your day, not by looking at data like they do now!” one of the last old men declares, and when Peter is left alone afterward he has trouble stopping himself from longing to get back in.

Not the way you long for the future, for the summer, or for a holiday, but the way you long to get back to yourself. To how it was “in our day,” even though that time never really existed except in our filtered memories. You long to be the person you think you were, during some sort of youth when you tell yourself that life was uncomplicated, or the man you imagine you could have been if only you had the chance to do everything again. Not longing for that is difficult for most people, and for some it is all but impossible.

The church is almost empty now. Peter gathers together his few belongings and his many emotions and touches his fingers to Ramona’s photograph one last time. It was taken by someone without her knowledge, because no one ever dared to try when she was aware of it, she’s young, standing behind the bar with Holger with her arms up in the air, so someone has evidently scored a goal on television. Possibly even Peter.

“Only moments, eh, Ramona? Was that it? I reckon you could have given us a few more. Who am I… going to talk hockey with now?”

His voice grows thick and his eyes prick with that last sentence, and shortly afterward his whole face is burning with embarrassment when he turns around and realizes he isn’t alone. Elisabeth Zackell is still sitting in her place ten rows back in the church, as if she’s waiting her turn. The hockey coach and bar owner may not have shared anything that could be called a friendship, but for Zackell it was probably as close as she got, she used to eat boiled potatoes and drink lukewarm beer

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