The conferences

One-line summary

Forty-eight arenas, two forms of ice. Verglas is the clear ice. Givre is the pale ice. Every arena is one or the other. None is both. None changes.

For two seasons the league was one list. The Almighty Ice spent the Season 2 intersaison manifesting twenty-four more arenas, and forty-eight arenas cannot be run the way twenty were. Le Council’s Scheduling Office said so without softening it: a single sequence of matchdays, resolved one game at a time, cannot carry a league this size inside anything Le Council would recognise as a season.

So the league runs on two tracks. Something had to decide which team belonged to which.

The Ice had already decided. It had been sorting its arrivals into two ice signatures since before Le Council understood there were two piles.

The two forms

Le Council withheld the names for most of Season 2, on the stated grounds that naming a thing tends to precede the thing insisting on being real. The Ice manifested twenty-two more arenas anyway, and the rationale expired.

Verglas

The clear form—hard, glassy, continuous, without grain. The ice of freezing rain, of a surface arrested mid-motion, of the thin bright glaze that forms when water freezes faster than it can turn white.

Givre

The pale form—soft-surfaced, feathered, an accretion of fine crystal. The ice of frost, of rime, of the slow white bloom that gathers on a cold window overnight.

Both are ordinary terrestrial ice-science terms. The community identified both within two days of the first manifestation. Le Council’s Office of Naming Conventions—which had spent the entire season being instructed to stop—reports that the names were already waiting, and that all it did was agree with them.

La Conférence du Verglas

“The clear ice.”

Twenty-four arenas, sorted, registered, whole. Accent #3E8FC7.

#	Team	#	Team
1	Montréal Maples	13	Medellín Mapaches
2	Winnipeg Wendigos	14	Gander Geese
3	Anchorage Auroras	15	Oahu Otters
4	Tokyo Titans	16	Cuzco Crows
5	São Paulo Serpents	17	Singapore Scorpions
6	Guadalajara Gatos	18	Reykjavik Ravens
7	Busan Blizzards	19	Nuuk Nanuqs
8	Ushuaia Undertow	20	Barbados Barracudas
9	Perth Pyres	21	Tahiti Tsunami
10	Havana Hammers	22	Panama Pangolins
11	McMurdo Monoliths	23	Phuket Podcasters
12	Wellington Whales	24	Caracas Chameleons

La Conférence du Givre

“The pale ice.”

Twenty-four arenas—the last of them found not on any map, but beneath the waves, in a single hall three thousand metres down. Accent #8FA9BC.

#	Team	#	Team
1	Helsinki Howlers	13	Oslo Owls
2	Stockholm Sirens	14	Kyiv Kestrels
3	Prague Phantoms	15	Amsterdam Aardvarks
4	Vladivostok Vodkas	16	Dublin Dragons
5	Rimini Rinklers	17	Cyprus Chimeras
6	Johannesburg Jaguars	18	Moscow Mules
7	Mumbai Monsoons	19	Samarkand Seagulls
8	Dakar Djinns	20	Oman Orcas
9	Nairobi Narwhals	21	Chengdu Cranes
10	Cairo Crocodiles	22	Lagos Lions
11	Monaco Moose	23	Zanzibar Zebras
12	Tehran Tigers	24	Atlantis Amonites

The twenty-fourth

When Le Council published the sort, the Givre list stopped at twenty-three.

Le Council checked the count in the manner of an institution that would very much like the count to be wrong, and confirmed repeatedly that it was not. The Ice had produced twenty-four of one form and twenty-three of the other, having never once left a thing incomplete by accident. There was no site at Level III. There was no region converging. By every instrument Le Council could point at the world, there was no twenty-fourth Givre arena anywhere on it.

Le Council noted one thing, once. An instrument at the Phenomenological Assessment Division had been returning a reading it had declined to classify. It was givre. It was strong. And its coordinates did not resolve to any location Le Council’s maps contained.

Le Council filed it as error. The error did not go away.

Two days later Le Council stopped calling it an error. The twenty-fourth Givre arena was never on the map because it was never on the land: The Sunken Hall, at 31°N 25°W, roughly three thousand metres beneath the North Atlantic, home of the Atlantis Amonites. Listed capacity: one.

What the split changes

• Scheduling. A team plays a round-robin inside its own conference—each of its twenty-three conference rivals home and away. See the season cycle.
• Standings. Each conference keeps its own table, positions 1–24.
• Cross-conference games are labelled Inter. They carry no conference tag and no conference accent.
• Playoffs. Each conference runs its own bracket: a Wildcard in which the 8th seed hosts a visitor drawn from the 9th to the 24th, then quarterfinals, semifinals and a Conference Final. Each conference produces one finalist. Teams from opposite conferences can therefore meet in the Final and nowhere else in the postseason—which is why an Inter rivalry has a single possible appointment.
• Parishes are unaffected—the Church constitutes one at every arena in both conferences.
• The All-Star games are played by two squads, the Verglas All-Stars and the Givre All-Stars. They are exhibitions and are excluded from standings, odds, and every team’s record.

What it does not change

Le Council wishes to be exact about what this is. Le Council did not create two conferences. Le Council documented two conferences that The Ice assembled arena by arena while Le Council was still declining to name the material they were made of.

This is, and has always been, the relationship. The Ice acts. Le Council writes it down.

See also

• Teams overview—all forty-eight teams, by conference.
• The Almighty Ice—why there are forty-eight cities at all.
• The season cycle—how two conferences make a schedule.
• Le Council—the party who writes it down.