He’s finally here. Right on schedule. In the cold, blue light of a thousand LED screens, Connor McDavid has reached the zenith.

The narrative demands it. The NHL’s marketing department, a group of people who seem to view "cool" as a foreign language they’re failing to learn via Duolingo, has been banking on this. They need McDavid to be more than a hockey player. They need him to be a platform. A vertical. A reason for someone in a Manhattan high-rise to care about a sport played on frozen water in a city that’s basically a giant construction site with a mall.

We’ve seen this script before. It’s the LeBron arc. The Crosby arc. The "best player in the world finally gets his shiny trophy" arc. But the way we’re consuming McDavid’s big moment feels different. It’s grittier, sure, but it’s also soaked in the oily sheen of modern tech-bro desperation.

Walk into a bar during a playoff game and you aren’t just watching hockey. You’re watching an integrated data stream. Every time McDavid touches the puck, the SMT sensors sewn into his jersey scream data at a server rack somewhere in Virginia. We know his top speed. We know his shift length. We know, via a terrifyingly bright graphic on the broadcast, that he has a 14.2% chance of scoring from the left circle while his heart rate is at 170 beats per minute.

It’s the gamification of a human being. We’ve turned the most instinctive, fluid athlete of a generation into a spreadsheet.

And then there’s the friction. The price of entry for this "moment" isn't just a cable subscription anymore. It’s a fragmented mess of streaming apps and gambling integrations. You want to see the greatness? That’ll be $20 a month for the regional sports network, another $15 for the national streamer, and a constant, intrusive barrage of "Live Odds" blinking in the corner of your vision. The NHL hasn't just sold the game; they've sold the soul of the viewing experience to DraftKings and MGM. Every time McDavid makes a cross-crease pass, a "Same Game Parlay" dies or is born. It’s exhausting.

The league is desperate to make McDavid a "content creator." They’ve let the Amazon cameras into the locker room for the latest behind-the-scenes docuseries, hoping to find a spark of personality in a man who has been trained since age 13 to speak exclusively in clichés. "We just gotta get pucks deep," he’ll say, while a $50,000 cinema camera captures the sweat on his brow in 4K HDR. It’s a high-definition look at a man trying very hard to say nothing at all.

This is the trade-off we’ve made. We get the high-speed puck tracking. We get the 5G-enabled helmet cams. We get the "unfiltered" access that is actually deeply filtered by three layers of PR agents and brand managers. In exchange, the mystery is gone. We used to wonder what it felt like to be that fast. Now, we have the telemetry to tell us exactly how many Newtons of force his skates are applying to the ice.

McDavid himself seems like he’d rather be anywhere else. He has the look of a man who just wants to play hockey but realized too late that his contract requires him to be a digital avatar for a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate. He’s the engine in a machine that’s way too big for the rink.

The Oilers are currently priced like a Silicon Valley unicorn—all potential, high burn rate, and a valuation that feels slightly delusional given the actual hardware in the trophy case. But the moment is here. The league has its star. The tech is in place. The gambling lines are set. We’ve built a massive, expensive, digital cathedral around a guy who just wants to go for a skate.

Does the data actually make the goal feel better? Or are we just measuring the decline of our own attention spans in frames per second?