One of the cooler things an athlete can do is return from injury with an “I’ve still got it” game. What a relief, a pleasant surprise. Fans kindly set the bar low—maybe she'll need a few days to get to full speed, no pressure—and then she clears it by a mile, reminding those fans just how much they’ve missed her. In the case of Laura Stacey, who hadn’t dressed for first-place Montreal’s past three games because of a lower-body injury, Victoire fans weren’t the only ones setting the bar low. When the team posted lines before Thursday night's home game against struggling rival Toronto, Stacey was listed on a line by herself, as a 13th forward. Surely, she was still working her way back.
But Laura Stacey isn't one for seeing how it goes. The tireless power forward always plays like she’s making up for lost time. After last night, consider those missed games made up for. In the Victoire’s 4-3 shootout win, Stacey set up every Montreal goal herself and finished with three points in a decidedly un-13th forward-like 20 minutes of ice time. The win kept Montreal at the top of the PWHL standings as the league heads into next week's international break.
If it seemed like Stacey was everywhere in the game against Toronto, that’s because she was. “She played on every single line, in every single situation, and that was the plan going into it,” head coach Kori Cheverie said afterward. “It was exciting to have a player in the 13th spot who can do that.”
Stacey got in on the scoring herself with an unassisted game-tying goal (1:21 in the video below) halfway through the third period. Though she has both the frame and inclination to drive to the net a lot, her shot is a threat enough from distance that she doesn’t always have to. Still, the most vivid Stacey in my head is not the goalscorer, but the forechecker. For that reason I’m partial to her second point of the night (1:10), which featured her flipping a puck away from Sceptres defender Savannah Harmon, checking Harmon into the boards and sliding the puck over to open teammate Maureen Murphy in front of the Toronto net.
“I don’t think you believed for a second that she was going to be the 13th forward,” said Toronto Sceptres head coach Troy Ryan after his team’s shootout loss. The room burst into laughter. Ryan coaches Stacey on the Canadian national team and had plenty of kind words for her, but knew her well enough not to fall for any lineup tricks. “She’s a great player and she did a great job tonight. She’s not a 13th forward.”
Once Stacey carried the Victoire to overtime, she and Marie-Philip Poulin finished things off with a shootout score each. For the Stacey-Poulin family, as well as the whole team, it has been a fine four-game homestand. It began with a revenge win over the second-place Minnesota Frost, whose high-powered offense probably poses the biggest threat to Montreal at this point in the season. (The previous time the Frost and Victoire played, in a neutral-site matchup in Denver, the Victoire lost Stacey to the injury, and the game to Minnesota.) On Wednesday night in Montreal's 4-1 win over Ottawa, Poulin also recorded a hat trick, the second of her PWHL career, to become the league leader in goals.
As Stacey watched the hats rain down for her wife, she was still unsure about her own timeline for returning. “It’s always tough sitting in the stands, watching your teammates play and wanting to be a part of it,” she said in Thursday's postgame press conference, before revealing that she’d suited up on short notice. “I just found out that I was playing earlier today. It was still touch-and-go a little.” Maybe that's the secret to achieving an “I’ve still got it” game: No time to think or stress—just go.
