Chapter 1 — Hockey Stars Can't Overcome My Figure

The Person Behind the Ice Arena Lights

At eleven o'clock at night, the White Tiger Ice Palace had only a single strip of light shining from the tactical analysis room on the second floor, where Dai Yen Thao sat in front of three screens arranged in a bow shape, scrolling through a counterattack of the Han River Iron Eagle Team until he memorized every centimeter of the skate of the player wearing the number seven shirt on the opposing side.

She stopped at the twenty-third second, drew a red circle around the position of the opponent's left wing-back, then typed in the note box: "Fourth defender Thiet Ung tends to retreat half a beat slowly when facing a cross-field dribble from the right wing. It can be exploited by passing diagonally twice in a row, forcing him to choose between covering and holding position."

It was the type of note she had written hundreds of times in the past four years. Nameless. No signature. There was only an internal code in the corner of the file — YT-047 — that only the team's technical department knew who was behind it.

There was a knock on the door, then the door opened before she could answer. Dai Trong Nghiep, head coach of the White Tiger Bang Giang Team, walked in with his team jacket loosely draped over his shoulder, his face marked with the tiredness of someone who had been standing next to the ice rink continuously since six o'clock in the afternoon.

"You're still here," he said, not a question.

"The match against Iron Eagle Song Han is three weeks away, dad." Yen Thao did not turn her head, her eyes were still glued to the screen. "I want to finish the analysis before Duy practices tomorrow morning."

He walked up behind his daughter, looked at the screen for a moment, then sighed. "You know dad always says this team is lucky to have you. But he's also your father, Yen Thao. Every night at eleven o'clock he sees you sitting here, and Bao Duy has been home since eight o'clock."

"I like this job." She spoke, her voice soft but firm. "It doesn't have to be a sacrifice if you really want to do it."

Dai Trong Nghiep did not argue further, just placed his hand on his daughter's shoulder for a moment and then left the room. He knew he had no right to say more — because he, as head coach, was also the biggest beneficiary of his daughter's anonymous working hours. The Bach Ho Bang Giang team, from a middle-class club struggling to stay in the rankings six years ago, is now one of the top three forces in the Vietnam Professional Hockey Championship, largely thanks to the spectacular rise of a player named Tong Bao Duy — who very few people in the media know was once a reserve contract that was almost liquidated.

Yen Thao saved the file, named it according to the familiar convention: "PT_ThietUng_v14_YT047", then sent it to the team's internal system, where the coaching team would receive it the next morning as an anonymous document from the "analysis department." She stood up, stretched, looked out the large glass window of the analysis room, where she could see the entire empty ice surface below, white streaks of light reflecting on the mirror-smooth ice.

She remembered the night she first saw Tong Bao Duy on that very ice, six years ago. At that time, he was only twenty-three years old, a striker with good personal technique but a psychologically fragile competition that only needed the opponent to shout a provocative sentence and he could completely collapse in the remaining half. The board of directors at that time had a meeting to discuss liquidating his contract before the end of the season. It was Yen Thao, then twenty-one years old, a recent graduate of Sports Data Science, who asked her father to give her a chance — not to prove herself, but because she saw in Bao Duy's clumsy play a potential that no one had properly exploited.

Four years later, Bao Duy was the second honorary captain, the main representative face of Viet Thinh Group, and the name that appeared on every advertising banner in front of the gate of Bach Ho Ice Palace. And no one, not even the most experienced sports reporters, knew that behind each of his clever speeches in front of the camera, each time he accurately "read" the opponent's tactics in the locker room, was a girl sitting quietly on the second floor of the training building, three screens lit until midnight.

Her phone vibrated. Message from Bao Duy: "Are you still in the analysis room? Go home and rest, I have to practice hard tomorrow."

She smiled and typed back: "Almost done. Go to sleep first. I'll send the Thiet Ung analysis video to the system tomorrow morning before the tactical meeting."

"You're so good," he texted back with an emoji. "I don't know how I can live without you."

She looked at that message for a long time, a familiar warm feeling spreading in her chest. That was what made her continue to stay every night and refuse every other opportunity that came her way—not because she had no choice, but because she believed that love, when placed with the right person, deserved to be nurtured with everything one had.

The only thing is, their relationship had never been made public. That was a request from the team itself, more specifically from Pho Dinh Khang, CEO of Team Bach Ho Bang Giang, who always emphasized that Bao Duy's "single, career-focused" image was part of the commercial value that Viet Thinh Group was paying to maintain. At first, Yen Thao did not pay much attention to that. She simply thought that love did not need to be proven publicly, that the most important things were still happening between them, and that no one else needed to know.

She turned off the computer, put on her coat, and walked out into the dark hallway of the training building. Down on the field, the security lights were still dimly lit on the ice, reflecting like a giant mirror with no one looking at it. She stood for a moment at the glass door, looking down, remembering the feeling of the first time she walked into this place as a ten-year-old child, holding her mother's old ice skates, running down the hallway while her father coached the youth team.

This ice rink for her is not just a place to work. It was her whole childhood, where she learned that victory never comes from a single individual, but from countless silent hands behind the scenes — the one sharpening skates in the middle of the night, the one analyzing videos until their eyes get tired, the one recording every smallest detail without anyone clapping.

When she got to the parking lot, she met Mai Bao Tram — the team's internal communications specialist and also her best friend since college — sitting on a bench eating a cold lunch box.

"Are you doing it at this hour again?" Bao Tram asked, giving her a piece of cookie from her bag. "Yen Thao, to be honest, one day I will be exhausted because of this team."

"I won't be home early either." Yen Thao smiled and sat down next to you.

"I'm different. I work for salary." Bao Tram glanced at her. "And I do it because I love someone who doesn't appreciate what I put into it."

Yen Thao did not respond immediately. She looked out into the dark courtyard, where the lights from the main gate cast long shadows on the concrete floor. "He appreciates it. He just doesn't show it on the outside."

"Well," Bao Tram shrugged, unable to hide her skepticism, "I just hope he shows up one day before it's too late."

That sentence passed through Yen Thao's ears like a gentle breeze and did not linger for long. She remembered the evening four years ago, when she sat in front of her father in the coaching office, presenting a twelve-page plan on rehabilitating a reserve player who was about to be liquidated. Then her father asked directly: "Are you sure you want to waste your time on a gamble that is almost certain to lose?" She answered without hesitation: "I don't look at it as a gamble, Dad. I see what others haven't seen, that's all." That answer, looking back now, was both the reason she was proud and the reason why she, without realizing it, secretly attached her self-worth to another person's growth.

On the way to the small apartment near the White Tiger Ice Palace, she passed by a giant banner standing in front of the main gate, printed with a picture of Tong Bao Duy swinging a stick to kick a ball, with the words below reading: "Tong Bao Duy — Soul of the White Tiger of the Ice River." She looked at that familiar photo like she had seen it hundreds of times before, not feeling the least bit sad about the fact that her name would never appear next to that name. For her, seeing him standing in that position, knowing that a part of her hand contributed, was enough.

She was still thinking about Thiet Ung Song Han's counterattack, about the cross-field passing angle that could be exploited, and about how she would reinterpret that strategy so that Bao Duy would be most receptive to it in the meeting tomorrow morning. She didn't know that in just a few weeks, everything she had quietly built for four years would be challenged by a shadow from the past of the person she loved - a shadow named Dinh Ha Vy, who was preparing to step back into Bao Duy's life with a story that could destroy everything Yen Thao had worked so hard to build.

But that night, she only knew that the analysis room light would still be on tomorrow night, and the next night too, as it had been for the past four years — because to her, that was not a sacrifice. That is love, the way she understands and chooses to live with it.