To the cheers and applause of thousands of attendees at the annual fan convention BookCon, Jacob Tierney, director-screenwriter of the hit TV series Heated Rivalry, and Rachel Reid, author of the books it is based on, walked on to the main event stage at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Centre.

The two Canadians have been international celebrities for just a few months and still find themselves wondering if all the noise is for someone else.

“We don’t really get to experience this kind of energy and fandom in person very often,” Tierney says just after their joint appearance, a highlight of the weekend gathering of (mostly) young book fans. “It’s been a bit more of an amorphous online thing.”

Since the first episode of Heated Rivalry dropped on HBO Max last November, Tierney’s adaptation of Reid’s Game Changer series featuring star-crossed hockey greats Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov has become a phenomenon that has boosted the sport’s popularity, made Reid a leader of the thriving genre of sports romance fiction, and made Olympic torch-bearers out of lead actors Hudson Williams (Shane) and Connor Storrie (Ilya).

Tierney expects to begin filming the second season this summer, based in part on the second of Reid’s novels about Shane and Ilya, The Long Game. The author, meanwhile, is working on a third Shane and Ilya book, Unrivaled. Both are scheduled for 2027 releases.