The first decision Mark Johnson made was a no-brainer. Late in Sunday’s Frozen Four women’s championship game, the Wisconsin Badgers team he has coached for more than two decades was beginning to tilt the ice. But they still trailed 3-2 to their biggest challenger of late, the Ohio State Buckeyes, who they were playing in the title game for the third straight year.
The first two of those championship games had been tight defensive battles, decided on the margins; both times, a goaltender was named Most Outstanding Player. Sunday’s game featured a little more scoring, but it was shaping up the same way. In the third period, Ohio State gave Wisconsin no room to equalize, until they did: With under two minutes remaining, the Buckeyes took a too-many-skaters penalty after a harried line change. The penalty was juuust about killed, until it wasn’t. Wisconsin star Laila Edwards emerged from the chaos of a last-second 6-on-4 scrum with rare conviction. She told her bench that she’d seen an Ohio State defender covering the puck in the crease before the whistle.
After the Badgers’ successful coach’s challenge, NCAA rules gave Wisconsin the option: to assess a minor penalty or to take a penalty shot. “You got shooters on your team. Take the penalty shot all day,” ESPN analyst Blake Bolden said. With just 18 seconds left in the game, the choice seemed obvious.
Johnson left the second decision up to his team. “Who wants it?” he asked his bench.
That Kirsten Simms would want it—that everyone else would want her taking it, too—was no given. The Badgers were rich with options. There’s Edwards, a 6-foot-1 phenom who’d scored Wisconsin’s first goal in this game and led her team in goalscoring this year. Effervescent senior Lacey Eden had a big game when these teams met in the regular season. My own Wisconsin favorite is KK Harvey, a transfixing blueline skater who makes me regret writing “can’t take your eyes off her” about any other athlete, because with her, I actually do mean it. Edwards, Harvey, and senior teammate Casey O’Brien were finalists for the Patty Kazmaier Award for the best player in women’s college hockey, the rare trio of finalists all from one school. This spring, five current Badgers will play for Team USA in the women’s world championships. But the person who put her hand up was the junior winger Simms.
“I can’t really say it was initially my choice,” Simms told reporters afterward. Laughing, she explained that she had fallen victim to peer pressure. “I had everyone on the bench screaming, ‘SIMMS! SIMMS! You do it, you do it!’ So I was like, you know what, whatever. Coach is going to need to see my hand go up for me to actually go.”
The Badgers chose well. Simms might be the most skilled stickhandler in college hockey, and she’d had some success getting pucks past Buckeyes, dating back to her freshman year, when she deked her way to a regular-season shootout win and then scored the only goal in the national title game. As Simms skated out to take the shot, her teammate Ava McNaughton, who stopped 20 of 23 shots in goal, turned away from the ice—not in fear, but with confidence.
“I didn’t look. I didn’t need to look because she already had so many eyes on her and I know that she has so many moves up her sleeve,” McNaughton said. “I knew that she had everything she needed in her toolbox, and I didn’t need to look. All I needed to hear was the crowd.” She heard them when Simms dangled Ohio State goaltender Amanda Thiele all the way to her right, leaving Simms a wide-open net to tie the game.
The pressure of overtime was a different kind of pressure, but Simms embraced it just the same. A couple minutes in, she banged in a rebound off a shot from Eden to deliver Wisconsin the program’s eighth national championship.
“I wanted to see who wanted to step up and own it,” Johnson said in the postgame press conference, reaching for a golf metaphor. “You can’t have one ounce of negativity in your mind as you pick the puck up. It’s gotta be all positive, because if you think about what’s going on, you’re going to miss your putt and you’re going to miss the shot.”
Though he is famous for his “Miracle on Ice” heroics, Johnson confessed that he might not have volunteered to take the shot had he been in the same position. But as his current and former players told The Athletic’s Hailey Salvian in a recent profile, his job is to instill players with confidence they can draw on in these moments. Simms said she felt it as soon as she raised her hand. “I was super nervous going into that moment obviously, but they calmed me down and reminded me to just be confident in what I do.”
