LAVAL, QUEBEC — I wasn’t close enough to hear Laura Stacey’s screams last Thursday, but I saw her wife’s panic clear as day. “When one of my teammates gets caught, I get fired up,” Marie-Philip Poulin told LSTW last year. “But when it’s Laura, my heart drops. I want to react and it’s hard not to, but I can’t.”
That Poulin was reacting—bending over her wife who laid crumpled on the ice, frantically waving over medical personnel, skating said medical personnel to Stacey as fast as she could, staying with her the whole time she was being examined, begging for them to call an ambulance, giving her a shoulder to lean on as she wobbled off the ice several excruciating minutes later—made me feel nauseous.
“I knew she was in full panic mode, and I was a little bit too,” Stacey said of the moment on Wednesday night.
The vibes had already been bad at Place Bell. The crowd was just 6,104 for the first game of the Walter Cup Finals, apparently the lowest attendance the Montreal Victoire have ever had at the arena. It made enough sense—the game had been officially scheduled just two days prior, plus the Habs were playing at the same time downtown—but I didn’t like the eerie quiet, not at all. I was also just tired. Game 5 of the semifinals had taken it out of me. “YOU should be drinking pickle juice,” my friend texted when I complained about the lack of break.
I wasn’t the only exhausted one. It felt like everything the Victoire did on the ice was half-hearted. The lack of bite, combined with a truly atrocious number of missed calls by the refs—my seat neighbor and I agreed they must have forgotten their whistles at home—gave the game a foul stench. The only Montreal player I saw playing with hustle, aside from the ever-steady Ann-Renée Desbiens in net, was Stacey.
It wasn’t the first time Montreal’s alternate captain has had to rally her troops. She was the best player for Canada in the Olympic gold medal game they lost to the U.S. in February. When PWHL play returned following the tournament, Victoire co-alternate captain Erin Ambrose didn’t; she was out for seven games because of an injury she picked up during the Olympics. After the first three of those games, Poulin, the team’s captain and the GOAT of women’s hockey, was out for 10. The very good Maureen Murphy was also out for nine games. Stacey was left to lead the team, and she did so more than capably. While Poulin and Murphy were out, the Victoire won eight games in a row.
And then, of course, came Game 1 of the Victoire’s semifinal series against the Minnesota Frost, when Stacey scored a hat trick. It wasn’t enough to make up for the five goals the Frost scored, but what more can you ask?
In Game 1 of the Finals, before she got hurt, Stacey engineered the Victoire’s first goal of the night. Trailing the Ottawa Charge 1-0 12 minutes into the third, Stacey took matters into her own hands, driving the puck down the ice with her signature speed. She curled around the goal, saw Nadia Mattivi was crossing the blue line, and laid off a pass to her. The Italian then sent the puck across the face of the net to Abby Roque who put it away.
We were making another charge (hah) a few minutes later when Ottawa stripped the puck from us at the top of their zone and quickly formed a two-on-one heading towards our net. It was Rebecca Leslie who restored the Charge’s lead a few minutes later, and before long the Victoire had to pull the goalie. My heart was already poised to make its way into my chest when Gabbie Hughes pushed Stacey into the boards.
During those awful minutes while Stacey was on the ice, I had three coherent thoughts: 1. We were losing with 18 seconds left in the first game of the PWHL Finals. 2. We had surely lost Stacey for the series, and maybe even longer. 3. What a shitty game.
The teams squared up again for the faceoff, and I waited for the clock to wind down. Wind down it did, until there were two seconds left. Ambrose quarterbacked a beautiful pass from our zone up to Poulin, who picked it up and found Murphy. She fired off a shot, which Ottawa goaltender Gwenyth Philips blocked but didn’t catch. From there, it was an all-out frenzy, which ended in a buzzer—the right kind of buzzer. Somehow, a tumbling Nicole Gosling stuck her stick in the right place, and we were even. As we headed into the intermission before overtime, the in-stadium announcer revealed that the second assist belonged to Poulin.
Bewilderment and dread swirled in my stomach as the break before overtime sped by. Sure, we got the equalizer, but would we be able to win the series without Stacey? I doubted it.
Soon enough, the players filed back onto the ice. They did their customary circles around their respective halves, then gathered around their benches. That’s when I spotted her—number 7, skating in circles after everyone else had huddled up. Stacey was, beyond my wildest dreams and perhaps her better judgment, back. I levitated, and the rest of Place Bell did, too. Chants of “Stacey! Stacey!” rang around the arena. She might be an Ontarian, but Montreal has adopted her as our own. With shaky hands, I wrote in my notes: “Easter is not a holiday that my people celebrate but this is what I’d imagine it feels like.”
Laura Stacey rising from the dead (a knee dislocation) was more than enough motivation to power her teammates, and the fans, through overtime. Less than three minutes in, as my neighbor was looking up one of the refs’ names to be able to more effectively heckle him, Maggie Flaherty passed the puck towards Ottawa’s net from the blue line. Stacey was there. She tipped it towards the far post, and it bounced off of Roque’s face mask (!), and into the net. We may have only been a few thousand fans that night, but it no longer mattered: we were feral. As the players celebrated and skated off the ice, we couldn’t stop chanting “Stacey! Stacey!”
“We play for Stace,” Roque said after the match, still sporting her black eye from the semifinals.
There’s a video that was played at Place Bell before every playoff game this year. It’s a compilation of a bunch of quotes from Victoire players and coach Kori Cheverie, and clips from games throughout the season. By the fifth home game, I practically knew it by heart. A soundbite from Stacey opens the video. “Our team has been through quite a bit of adversity this year,” she said over eerie music, foretelling her own near-demise. “Those moments are what have made us come together as a group and find a way.”
That would be put to the test in Game 2, which was blessedly much better attended than the first. The Victoire started off enthusiastic on offense but sloppy on defense. When Sarah Wozniewicz put the Charge up eight minutes in, it didn’t come as a surprise. But I didn’t have that sense of doom I may have had before. Our team has been through quite a bit of adversity this year, after all, and look where we were anyway.
We pressed throughout the first period, tallying 11 shots to Ottawa’s five. One of our best chances was on an Ottawa power play, when Stacey was on a breakaway but just couldn’t finish the job. Who would Stacey have freed from the penalty box if she had scored? Poulin, of course. The game seemed to be referencing the fanfiction-esque Game 1. Signs shown to the crowd that said things like “U-Hauling Walter home,” and “Hey Marcus! We could introduce you to Walter,” only hammered the point home.
We had a flurry of good chances to close the period, to no avail. We went into the first intermission down a goal. Early in the second period, both Stacey and Ottawa star Emily Clark got time in the penalty box for a scuffle. Not five seconds later, Kati Tabin, the Montreal defender, picked up the puck from the chaos after a face-off and put it away. The crowd celebrated, but nobody celebrated harder than Stacey did in her penalty box. (The jailbreak rule didn’t apply, since she and Clark were serving identical penalties.)
Death, taxes, and Victoire playoff games at Place Bell going to overtime. This time, it was high-energy out of the gate, with chances going both ways. I chuckled to myself when, in a break between plays, the arena played Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”—Poulin and Stacey had danced to it at their wedding.
It was an outrageous Desbiens save that kickstarted the winning play. Kaitlin Willoughby shepherded the puck into Ottawa’s zone and sent it along the backboards to Roque, who was surrounded by Charge players. She somehow found the nearby Poulin, who had the wherewithal to see a wide-open Flaherty through basically every Charge skater. Poulin passed it to her—how it got through, I have no idea—and she put it away decisively. The crowd, which had still been chanting Desbiens’s name when the buzzer sounded, went wild.
I left that game feeling more confident than a sports fan should ever feel that the Walter Cup was ours. “We have the juice!!!!” I texted one friend. “I kinda think they win it in Ottawa,” I texted another.
We lost Game 3, and I would not like to talk about it.
My dreams of a sweep had been too good to be true—arrogant, even. Ottawa’s win made doubt appear at the edge of my confidence. They had momentum now. All it would take is one more win, and we’d be even.
The following morning, I went on a walk to shake off the post-defeat blues. As I was appreciating the many shades of green that have recently sprung in Montreal, a scraggly guy in a Victoire jersey rollerskated by me, looking chill as ever. That, I thought, is the energy I need.
Apparently, Poulin had that energy too. On Wednesday night, Cheverie said, “After the loss last game, we could have hung our heads, and I got a text from our captain. She just said, ‘We got this.’”
For Game 4, we stepped up the intensity. As much as the Victoire would have loved to win the series on home ice, they did not want to risk the reverse sweep. The first period was bursting with chances for both teams, but the goalies were up to the challenge.
As it so often happens, a great Desbiens save directly preceded a Montreal goal. Early in the second period, Clark had driven it down the ice and cut it directly in front of our net, where Laroque was crashing. Somehow, Desbiens kept it out. Not 30 seconds later, Poulin found miles of open ice down the right side and carried the puck into Ottawa’s zone. She held it up for a following Roque and headed toward the net. Turns out, Roque could do it herself. She launched the puck toward the goal, and it bounced off a Charge defender’s stick and slipped under Philips’s pad.
We were in the lead, but I dared not get my hopes up again, not after what happened in Game 3. With Ottawa’s large crowd behind them and a history of scoring late goals, the game still felt tied. I’d need a lot more cushion to be able to enjoy the game without worrying about a comeback.
When Poulin was sent to the penalty box for goaltender interference halfway through the third period, I wasn’t exactly comforted. Ottawa created some incredible chances on their power play, forcing Desbiens to make stop after stop. There were 20 seconds left on our désavantage numérique when Roque picked up a puck that Stacey had loosened in our zone before subbing out. Instead of clearing it and joining her linemate on the bench, Roque carried it all the way to Ottawa’s end, fending off the insistent pressure of Ottawa captain Brianne Jenner. As she pulled the puck across Philips’s crease, she waited, waited, waited to shoot. Finally, after fully going past the face of the goal, she flipped the puck up into the net. 2-0, ten minutes left.
“Abby, that jailbreak goal—unbelievable, honestly,” Poulin said after the match. “I think I peed a little in the penalty box, I was so excited. And for them to come see me [during the celebration] was just unbelievable. A lot of emotion there.”
I still refused to believe we’d win. A few minutes later, I wrote in my notes, “6:15 left but I’m not believing it til I see it.” Flaherty must have heard me. Eight seconds after that, the defender took a shot she had no business shooting, from the blue line, and it sailed into the net uninterrupted. That was when I exhaled. We were going to do it.
Lina Ljungblom put an exclamation mark on the win a couple minutes later when she muscled her way onto the puck in front of Ottawa’s goal and made no mistake putting it away.
My roommate, whom I have dragged to multiple Victoire games over the years, walked into the living room shortly after. She looked at me sitting on the couch in quiet awe, and looked at the TV. “Do I see four fucking goals?” she asked. I nodded, and she gave me a big hug. We did it.
The buzzer went off, Desbiens threw her stick into the air, everyone was crying, I was crying. We had persisted through injuries to our top players, four playoff overtimes, two years of flaming out in the semifinals, the fact that no regular-season winning team had ever hoisted the Walter Cup.
It felt so fitting to win how we did. The first goal was a bonafide wife line goal—Stacey and Poulin had both assisted Roque’s shot. Roque’s second goal freed Poulin, our fearless leader, the beating heart of the team. The third goal was by Flaherty, who, along with Roque, was a vital addition to the Victoire this year, part of the smart roster moves made by general manager Danièle Sauvageau to offset the losses from the expansion draft. (Roque had had on-ice friction with Poulin while she played for New York. “Forever ago, I remember the first practice we had together, seeing her in the Victoire jersey, I couldn’t believe it,” Poulin said. “I said, ‘Abby freaking Roque on the Montreal Victoire.’”) Ljungblom, who scored the fourth, was part of the Victoire last year, but was one of the many depth pieces who dramatically improved this season and powered that aforementioned win-streak. The well-distributed ice time for Game 4 is a testament to the complete team Cheverie and co. have put together. The 0 part of the 4-0 scoreline shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Desbiens is this team’s backbone, the ace I’d say we rely on a little too much if she weren’t so damn good.
“We’ve talked to [Poulin and Stacey] in the past about they don’t need to do it all, that we can do it as a group and as a team. And certainly with the injuries that they’ve been going through, we needed to lean on each other and we needed to lean on everybody in order to do it, and everyone stepped up,” Cheverie said.
Both of them indicated how much they’ve put their bodies through. “Personally, since February, it’s been hard emotionally, physically,” Poulin said. Her parents said she’ll probably need surgery after the season.
When Stacey was asked after the match what she’d be doing to celebrate, she said, “Hopefully a nice drink to make the body feel a little better.”
This PWHL season wasn’t the first time these veterans have sacrificed for their teams, and their sport. After the game, Poulin reflected on the PWHPA, the women’s league that lasted from 2019 to 2023. “We were showing up weekend after weekend, where we didn’t know who we were going to play with, with empty stands, and we’re like, ‘Where are we going here?’”
The answer arrived with the PWHL, where finally women’s hockey had the financial backing to last. But it didn’t spell immediate success for Poulin and her Victoire comrades. “There was a moment in Year 1 where you just saw the look on Pou’s face when Boston was going on to the second round, and that’s not a face I ever wanted to see again. I didn’t want to see disappointment like that on a player’s face,” Chevrie said. “Then we went through it again in Year 2.”
Those years hung over the team. “We shed tears over this Cup,” Stacey said after the game. “It always creeps back into your head. The past two seasons, everybody doubted us and sometimes we were like, ‘Can we get past this thing that’s hovering over our heads?’”
But a little perspective goes a long way, even in Game 4 of a hockey final.
Stacey recounted: “Kori came in between the second and third when we were up one-nothing and literally said, ‘Guys, what do we do for a living?’ And we were all like, ‘Well, we play hockey.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, and I get to coach hockey.’ And she was like, ‘That’s what we need to go out there and do and enjoy.’ Because how lucky are we that we’re in the Walter Cup Final in this packed building and we get to do what we love to do? And I think it hit us pretty good: This is it.”
