It's no secret that in a short amount of time, Heated Rivalry became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon. From the moment the queer hockey romance series premiered on Crave and HBO Max in November 2025, the series blew up in ways that no one could have really anticipated, and as stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie became more and more popular, so did the show.
The love story between rival profession hockey stars Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov connected with a diverse audience for a number of reasons. Between the incredible performances of newcomers Williams and Storrie and creator Jacob Tierney's inspired vision for bringing these characters to life from the pages of Rachel Reid's book, it's a deep love that leads right into season 2.
However, the wildly popular television adaptation couldn't have been able to skyrocket into the hottest show in the world without Reid's words, and that's why March 25 can't pass without Heated Rivalry fans celebrating the day Shane and Ilya first came into existence.
March 25, 2026 is the 7-year anniversary of Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid being published
Since a lot of fans of the show likely read the Game Changers books after the fact, it might not be a well-known fact of when the books were first released. Reid published Game Changer, the first book in the series, on Oct. 22, 2018, which was then closely followed by the release of Heated Rivalry on March 25, 2019. This year, the book that inspired the TV show turns seven years old.
While Heated Rivalry had been a popular title among romance readers since its release, it hadn't yet reached its best-selling heights until the show's release in 2025. Being so, the six current novels in the series became immediately unavailable when the series debuted, making them incredibly difficult to find. But once fans were able to gets their hands on copies, Reid's books began to make appearances on the New York Times best-sellers list for the first time.
Prior to Heated Rivalry becoming a bingeable streaming sensation, Reid had only been given the designation of being a USA Today best-selling author. But as of December 2025, more than 650,000 copies of her Game Changers series have been sold. That figure is surely already out of date and will continue to increase with deluxe reissues of all six books coming this fall, including a hardcover special edition of Heated Rivalry, as well as a new book titled Unrivaled next year.
Even though all of the books in Rachel Reid's Game Changers series are special in their own way, as each one apart from the two centered on Shane and Ilya focus on different MM couples, there's something uniquely significant about Heated Rivalry. The pairing of Shane and Ilya, two professional hockey players, holds monumental stakes, and it's obvious why they are the center of the GC world.
Reading the book feels kinetic, electrically charged, as the couple navigates their complicated feelings for each other across nearly a decade, from the summer before their rookie season ("Summer before!") to years into their careers with cups under their skates. The graphic spicy scenes never feel gratuitous as they have a reason to exist beyond simply being the genre: Sex is how Shane and Ilya communicate, and Tierney understanding that made the show a perfect adaptation.
These days, it's common for page-to-screen adaptations to take far less than seven years to come into existence. The rights to some books are bought before they're even published, and they're on the big or small screen seemingly instantly. But Heated Rivalry had a little over half a decade to build a small but mighty fandom before bursting onto the scene and truly changing the world.
Seven years might not feel like a significant passage of time to observe, but look at how much Reid has been able to accomplish and continue to accomplish with Heated Rivalry in that time. Against all odds, she was able to build a romantic novel series worth adapting into what will become one of the best modern drama series of all time, and we can't wait to see what the next chapter holds.