The Tate McRae and Jack Hughes rumors have one major problem

Neither Tate McRae nor Jack Hughes has said a word publicly.

That silence is the most important detail in the story.

Page Six reported Friday that the singer and the New Jersey Devils center had ended a relationship of roughly eight or nine months.

Representatives for both declined to comment.

The trail leads back to August 4, when the gossip account DeuxMoi first raised questions about the couple's status. Three days later it was being written up as a settled fact.

McRae's Variety profile ran on August 3, one day earlier. She was answering a general question about privacy, not a breakup that had not yet surfaced.

Page Six cited one anonymous source saying Hughes ended the relationship. It cited another saying McRae did.

Both accounts cannot be correct.

Two unnamed people describing the same event in opposite terms usually means neither was close enough to know.

Neither source is named. Neither is described as anything more than close to the situation.

There is no date attached to the split and no location. There is no statement from either camp and no independent confirmation.

Neither of them ever publicly acknowledged the relationship in the first place. McRae told Rolling Stone in December that scrutiny of her previous breakup was overwhelming, and she has kept her personal life closed since.

The confirmed part of Hughes' summer is his job. He led the Devils with 77 points last season while New Jersey finished 42-37-3 and missed the playoffs.

Sunny Mehta took over as general manager in April and kept Sheldon Keefe as head coach in May.

Hughes enters that reset as the player the roster is built around.

The breakup may well be real.

But nobody involved has confirmed it, and the two versions of how it happened cancel each other out.

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