Same. I ended up going with a more or less random ship, and while the relationship is more a necessary demon than the focus, I still kept finding ways for it to prop up story once I committed and got over my initial reluctance of writing a 25k fic with-not-about a pairing I had no real ties to. If I had to do it again, it'd probably go even better in hockey since the usual six degrees of separation is narrowed down to, like, two degrees within the hockey world.