LAVAL, QUEBEC — The crowd at Place Bell for Game 1 was wound tight, like a guitar string on the brink of snapping. Our Montreal Victoire, who had never won more than one game in a playoff series, let alone a series itself, were set to face the Minnesota Frost, the only team who has ever won the Walter Cup, in the PWHL semifinals. It felt like everybody in the arena was holding their breath, bracing for history to unfold before us, unchanged.
It didn’t help that Minnesota scored twice before the first intermission. I could feel the crowd’s belief, or at least my own, ebbing. We needed the team to believe for us, to break open the glorious possibility of change.
Less than three minutes into the second period, Shiann Darkangelo delivered, making the most of chaos in front of Minnesota’s crease. It wasn’t an equalizer, but it was proof that mountains can be climbed, so long as you go one step at a time. The crowd’s reaction felt as much like a sigh of relief as a celebration.
But Darkangelo’s goal had broken open the teams’ bitter disdain for each other. There was brawl after brawl, the biggest one sparked by a check Britta Curl-Salemme laid onto Kaitlin Willoughby’s head shortly after a flurry of goals—Laura Stacey had equalized for the Victoire and Grace Zumwinkle promptly put the Frost back up, 3-2. Curl-Salemme’s illegal hit earned her a send-off, much to the pleasure of the Montreal crowd, who had been booing her anytime she touched the puck, as we do every time she plays at Place Bell. Earlier in the period, Curl-Salemme had also, in the words of the league’s disciplinary committee, “grabbed and pulled [Abby] Roque’s facial protector, sending her opponent to the ice with a degree of violence” that warranted a fine.
That’s the other key context for this series: We hate the Frost because they are our sworn enemy. Checks and fights often litter our match-ups—of course, my Victoire are perfect and every penalty they commit is necessary and forgiven—and no Frost player plays dirtier than Curl-Salemme, who, in her PWHL career, had incurred a fine and three different one-game suspensions before last week’s ejection and fine. In the Olympic gold medal game on February 19, she injured Montreal alternate captain Erin Ambrose, who then missed eight Victoire games upon the league’s return. Add on top of that, Curl-Salemme has a habit of espousing transphobia on social media, and it doesn’t appear to be letting up anytime soon, whine as she might about it all being a “misunderstanding.” When I went to a regular season Frost vs. Victoire game in Minnesota in March—we won 3-0, thank you very much—the lack of boos when Curl-Salemme touched the puck made me shudder. After Curl-Salemme’s ejection in Game 1, the jumbotron showed a fan’s sign that said “Curl makes me want to hurl,” and the crowd roared.
In the third period, Stacey tied things up again, which was followed shortly thereafter by a fourth Frost goal. The Victoire’s focus just wasn’t there—twice now the Frost had scored while the crowd was loudly celebrating a goal by Stacey. Stacey, Montreal’s other alternate captain, generously gave her team another chance to right their wrongs by scoring her third of the night with less than five minutes left in the period. Her hat trick—the first of her career, and the first in PWHL playoff history—sent the game to overtime, and, combined with Curl-Salemme’s ejection, made May feel like Pride Month came early. It still wasn’t enough. Jincy Roese found the back of the net less than five minutes into overtime, eliciting a screech of horror from the crowd and taking Game 1 for the Frost. It was almost laughable; the novelty of the bonkers game culminating in a result we know all too well: being down in the playoffs.
The series that followed was about as unpredictable as that first game. Game 2—made more tame by the blessed absence of Curl-Salemme—belonged to the goalies, who held it scoreless through regulation and two overtimes. It was the kind of game that made me wonder how anyone ever scores a goal; Ann-Renée Desbiens saved 38 shots for the Victoire, and Frost goaltender Maddie Rooney saved a whopping 51. It was none other than Marie-Philip Poulin who fought off the echoes of last year’s quadruple-overtime battle against Ottawa and punctured the haze of the third overtime. Roque and Stacey moved the puck up the ice and drew defenders toward the left side. Poulin had yards of space on the right, and when Roque sent the puck her way, she put it away with a marvelous, inch-perfect, one-timer.
Of course it was Poulin, who has been battling injuries since the Olympics and looked to have secured a new one earlier in overtime. Poulin, the best women’s hockey player the world has seen, was born just 150 miles up the St. Lawrence river. In Place Bell, the screens showed a fan holding a sign that read, “Fait-nous rêver, Captain Clutch”—make us dream.
After her game-winner, Poulin told the broadcast, “Abby—honestly I don’t know how she saw me with that back eye,” and cracked a huge smile. It was this energy—belief, joy, camaraderie—that Montreal brought to Minnesota.
Much to Minnesota star Taylor Heise’s dismay, the next two games would be played on back-to-back nights in St. Paul. The Victoire took their high energy into Game 3, coming back from a deficit with two goals just 24 seconds apart. They came from Maggie Flaherty and Hayley Scamurra, who both joined the Victoire this year and have been vital to the team’s much-improved depth. After taking the lead, Montreal successfully killed off five Minnesota power plays. Watching from home, I was able to appreciate the tenacious, almost meditative defense by the Victoire. Players across the ice were unbelievably attentive to the opponent’s puck, tapping it away with touches so deft they would really only be understandable if the skating was in slow motion. It was a nervy game, but the win—Montreal’s first ever playoff win in regulation—was everything: they couldn’t be eliminated the following night.
And thank goodness for that. Despite Maureen Murphy putting Montreal ahead after two scoreless periods in Game 4, Minnesota’s Sidney Morin caught fire and scored two goals through traffic. The game was played more to the Frost’s tenor; skirmishes fazed us, and lapses in focus cost us. The second goal happened on a Frost power play, which was caused by Stacey sending Curl-Salemme to the ice after the whistle was blown. When Kelly Pannek scored on our empty net to secure the Frost a 3-1 victory, I wrote in my game notes, “Kelly Pannek more like Kelly I’m panicking.” But a text my friend sent me steeled me for the battle ahead: “I’ve decided that Montreal needed to win the series at home.”
Less than 90 minutes before I was planning to head out to Laval for Game 5, I saw a tweet that the game would be postponed to an undetermined date. What, I thought, the fuck? Fox 9, a Minneapolis station, was reporting that some players on the Victoire were suffering an illness. Two hours and 11 minutes before the scheduled puck drop, the league put the game’s postponement on social media.
At the Olympics in February, 13 players on team Finland came down with norovirus, which necessitated the postponement of a match against Canada. Were that many Victoire players ill this time around? No, according to Pat Laprade of the Hockey News. It was just five. “Montreal still had enough healthy players to ice a lineup of 12 forwards and six defenders,” he tweeted, and described his sources around the league as “baffled.”
The decision made just about as much sense as the rest of the series had—none at all—so I went into Game 5, which was rescheduled for the following night, with a sense of acceptance. If we go out with five barfing players, Roque with a black eye, and a one-legged Poulin—her ice time had been limited since her knock in Game 2—well, at least we’ll have fought to the end.
On Tuesday night, the crowd at Place Bell seemed to agree with my absurdist attitude. We were loose, we were silly (my favorite sign of the night: “We already have a diva cup, now we need a Walter Cup”), and we had Curl-Salemme back to boo, fueling our passion. And it was like a flip had switched for the players: instead of a boxing match, they were just here to play hockey. To be clear, there were plenty of hits, and plenty of calls the refs should have made—never has a crowd chanted “Refs You Suck” so often. It just felt like the vitriol on the ice was turned to a simmer instead of a roiling boil.
Minnesota nearly tripled our shots in the first period. When a reporter asked Montreal coach Kori Cheverie after the game if she thought Montreal’s slow start had to do with players recovering from being sick, she said with a wry smile, “No, we start poorly every game.”
This time, it didn’t matter. It was Catherine Dubois’s shot, directly from a face-off that Poulin won, that started the scoring. We exalted. “Vibes are, dare I say, good here,” I texted my friend who had checked in on me with concern.
Indeed, the feeling throughout this series, even after the first game, was different than the Victoire’s previous playoff outings. “Even if we were down a goal, we never felt out of it,” Cheverie said of the series. “And I think maybe in the past, if you get down a goal, it’s hard to kind of climb out of that. And I felt like we never felt that way. I thought that there was a lot of belief.”
Having Desbiens in net is more than enough reason to believe. “We’re truly lucky to have her. Honestly, there’s moments where we kind of let her hang dry, and she’s always able to pull us out of those moments, and she’s done that all series long. She’s unbelievable,” Poulin said after the game. “And honestly, we can talk about that first game all day long. But how you finish, that’s how it matters.”
Twice throughout Game 5, Desbiens made saves so exquisite that the crowd reacted as if we had scored a goal. In the first period, she spun around to put her stick between the goal line and a puck that had slipped behind her. In the second period, she laid out like a starfish and made an absolutely ridiculous kick save midair. That one was on my end of the arena, and me and everyone else floated to our feet in pure shock. The Victoire’s successes have always run through Desbiens, and these playoffs are no different.
In the second period, however, our luck caught up to us. Curl-Salemme had a long carry, which meant that the crowd’s boos had reached a fever pitch when she laid the puck off for Abby Hustler, who then slipped it to Sam Cogan for the finish. During intermission (during which multiple folks around me were watching the Habs game) it dawned on me how funny it was that everything that had happened in the series so far—a hat trick, an ejection, a triple overtime, back-to-back games, a postponement—didn’t matter at all. We were tied heading into the last period of Game 5. It all, literally, came down to this.
Early in the third period, the referees awarded Montreal its first power play of the game. Rookie defender Nicole Gosling registered a nice shot but Rooney was smart to it. No sooner did my neighbor say, “Get it to Pou” than Ambrose found her near the red line. Poulin settled the puck, took one look at goal, and slotted it home in the upper far corner. The attendance on the night might have only been 6,104—the postponement, especially to a night when the Canadiens were playing downtown, didn’t do the Victoire many favors in recruiting a crowd—but if you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t know it. The volume was unbelievable.
We had almost a whole period to get through, and Desbiens came up huge time after time. When Rooney left her net, Minnesota launched an all-out bombardment. For those last few minutes, most people in the crowd were screaming their heads off, willing themselves to be the choppy waters that finally broke Minnesota’s playoff permafrost. I, unwilling to believe it until I saw it, was sitting still, my hands shaking. But when the final buzzer went off and maroon jerseys piled on the ice, I jumped up and down, squealing like a little kid.
“Everybody’s willing to do anything it takes to get that win, so we saw a lot of people putting their bodies on the line. Blocking shots hurts as a player. I won’t lie, as a goalie, it hurts a little less,” Desbiens said of those minutes. “But for them, it hurts a lot more. So for them to be willing to do that, we were able to clear the puck out of the zone multiple times, so that buys us valuable seconds.”
“The last two minutes felt like 60 minutes,” Cheverie said. “…I was pretty stressed. I was trying not to have a panic attack on the bench, but at the same time I felt calm. I felt like we had been through it so many times.”
Now, the Victoire move on to their first-ever finals. They face the Ottawa Charge, who knocked them out of the semifinals last year. But even making the finals is a huge step for this franchise, whose regular season success has never translated to the playoffs.
“I think it’s our biggest win in our organization’s history. We had to fight tooth and nail against a team like Minnesota. It wasn’t easy. Every goal felt like we had to fight against Rooney to get it past the goal line. And it just felt like they’d come right back, or vice versa; they’d score, we'd come right back,” Cheverie said. “And so I think it just shows a lot of what we’ve been through as an organization for three years. The coaches, we just kind of stood there on the bench and we were like, ‘Wow, that took three years to do.’”
Three years. Five games. Twenty minutes. It all feels like forever until it doesn’t.
