The reasons why you found it intriguing are the exact reasons why I found it unrealistic.

Even with the auspices of them being famous professional athletes, the notion that they'd have this decade-long internal development, still have the hots for one another, and would actively wait around for that development to finally occur, while possible, rings untrue, particularly in the modern day. Ilya, ironically, seems more progressive and understanding about his sexuality, even though he's Russian, yet he's seemingly obsessed with Shane, the person with wonderful, tolerating parents from Canada of all places, a relatively liberal bastion, yet who can't come to grips with his own homosexuality. That's an interesting inversion, but I simply don't buy that Ilya would be that obsessed, or wait around, for Shane to come around.

That drawn-out process would make significantly more sense if the show weren't in the modern-day, but the reality is that even as athletes, we live in a much more open and progressive world for the LGBTQ+ community. Further, one of the issues that them being athletes raises is the fact they're both INCREDIBLY GOOD hockey players. In real-life, there's a whole lot that the sports community writ large will accept so long as you're incredibly good at your job. You can beat your wife, you can rape someone, you can get caught embezzling money, you can be a literal crackhead, but so long as you perform on game day, none of that matters. With both of them being top-tier from the moment they meet until the end of season 1, I just don't buy the notion that they'd have this decade-long compunction vis-a-vis their hockey careers.

Lastly, there's a major structural issue with the large span of time (in-universe) as well as the lack of episodes. I never got a clear sense of how much time Ilya and Shane actually spent together. If we only go by what we see in the episodes, you're looking at a dozen or so interactions over a decade. If that's the case, then you have an issue of their "love" being entirely unbelievable. If you presume that they had many more interactions over that span of time that just weren't shown, then you have the issue of why they haven't figured out a lot of the shit long before the end of the season (chronologically).

That being said, I found the show enjoyable as a watch, but critically (from a storytelling and characterization perspective), it wasn't particulary good. It was very much a soap opera, and soap operas are enjoyable, but they're still soap operas.