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producers had also arranged for instant replays to be shown on the scoreboard. Travis watched himself skating hard on the big screen, then saw the footage flip to another camera, a bobbing view through several pylons. “My helmet cam,” he said. “Cool.”
    Next up was skating agility: Lars against – no surprise – Cody. The two competitors had to work their way through a complicated maze of pylons – no stick, no puck. The first through wasn’t necessarily the winner. They would get points for speed and finesse, and would lose points for touching the pylons.
    Lars was easily the Owls’ top skater, but he was no match for Cody, who several times used his special move to carve as tight as possible to a pylon without touching it. The crowd went crazy each time he did it. Travis had to acknowledge, Cody was pretty good on skates, if not much of a puck carrier, and with his blond good looks, the cameras were loving him. No wonder they wanted to call him Hollywood.
    The score was even. Screech Owls 1, Detroit Motors 1.
    The competition moved on fairly quickly after this. The producers were running a slick show. Travis figured they were on a tight budget and wanted to move through the events fast to keep costs down. Or for the sake of the fans, they just wanted to cut out as much of the waiting and setting up as they could – the boring stuff.
    Andy won the hardest shot, but Travis wasn’t convinced the kid he was up against was the Motors’ top shooter. Surely Smitty had a harder shot. When Travis had heard him ring a shot off the crossbar earlier, it had been louder than the bell at Lord Stanley Public School.
    Data was thinking something similar. “Why aren’t the Motors putting in their ringers?” he posted on Twitter. “Why aren’t they playing to their skills?”
    In the target shoot, Sam hit all four targets in ten shots, but Jesse had a bad time of it and hit none. The two Motors players hit three each. The Owls were declared the winner, though Travis wasn’t exactly sure about the math. If the two Owls had hit four targets in twenty shots and the Motors hit six, how come the Owls had won? He figured it was because only Sam was able to take out all the Styrofoam targets. Still, it seemed a bit cockeyed.
    Screech Owls 3, Detroit Motors 1.
    “We’re happy to be on top,” typed Data. “But why are we? How? Is there something going on with the scoreboard?”
    This time, another tweeter answered back: “Why is a very good question … Getting warm.”
    Data clicked on the profile of the person who had posted the message – “VintageEngine” – but that was the only tweet he’d ever written. And there was no profile and no picture of whoever VintageEngine might be. The profile said he was male, but that was it.
    The search and rescue event was the funniest. Fahd and one of the Motors players were blindfolded and, with their team calling out directions, had to skate to two stacking chairs placed at the far end of the ice. Fahd was to go first.
    “Left!” the Owls shouted at Fahd as he began skating, stiff as a board, hands held out in front of him.
    “Straight ahead!” they shouted.
    “Right!” Sam and Sarah screamed together when Fahd drifted too close to the boards for comfort.
    “Left!” Nish screamed.
    “
Nooo
!” the girls shouted. “
Stay right
!”
    Sam turned on Nish, her face blazing with anger. “You think it would be
funny
to smash him into the boards?”
    “I was just joking,” Nish said sheepishly.
    “You’ve a sick sense of humor,” she shot back at him.
    “Thank you,” Nish said, smiling.
    Fahd listened well. The Owls won the victory when the Motors player had trouble telling her left from her right.
    Screech Owls 4, Detroit Motors 1.
    The goalie race was really no race at all. The four of them started out, in full equipment, and Jenny lost her footing on the first turn and went down. Sliding like an out-of-control car on an icy street, she took out poor Jeremy, who