The whole season, win or lose, Montreal Victoire head coach Kori Cheverie and her players spouted their belief in the team. Listening to them week after week, the message started to feel tired. How sincerely can you focus on the good things after you lose? When goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens got hurt, then Kati Tabin got served a multi-game suspension, it was hard to picture this as a team that could sustain their early-season dominance. In March and April, the Victoire lost as much as they won. Come playoffs, would they show up and win games, or would they bow out suddenly and gracelessly like last year? But it really was true that every single player talked about the team’s confidence, every game. What comes first: the belief or the act of professing it? For the Victoire, maybe it doesn’t matter.
In Game 1, Montreal suffered from a serious case of playoff nerves. Silly mistakes saw pucks slip through Ottawa’s crease unanswered, and Montreal never led. Both the Victoire’s goals came off power plays—a good showing for their special teams—but they couldn’t figure out how to score without l’avantage numérique. Despite outshooting Ottawa, they did what they’d always done in the playoffs: lose.
After that game, the Victoire maintained they weren’t thinking about their dismal playoff record: 0-4 dating back to last year. “You don’t want to see that, you don’t want to hear that,” Laura Stacey said when a reporter brought it up. “I think we’re trying to not necessarily think about last year, as much as it’s brought up, because it’s a completely new team in that locker room.” Maureen Murphy emphasized that the team is process- rather than results-focused, and Cheverie said, “If we dwell on what’s in the past, we’re not going to make it very far, so we have to regroup and move forward.”
If the Victoire didn’t feel a monkey on their back after losing yet another playoff game, I did. My allegiance to the team had me convinced that if they couldn’t win the first, there was no way they’d bounce back. Expecting the worst is easier than letting my hopes grow.
That pessimism felt warranted after Montreal blew a two-goal lead in the dying minutes of regulation of Game 2. Kristin O’Neill and Stacey had scored emphatic goals in the first two periods, and it seemed the Victoire might live up to their name with relative ease. How foolish of me to hope. The Charge came into the third period with a vengeance and rained shot after shot on net. Aneta Tejralová’s went in in the 16th minute, and Brianne Jenner completed the comeback with 41 seconds to go. It all felt like a cursed prophecy coming true—that the Victoire are destined to choke in the playoffs. As overtime began, last season’s awful losses to Boston echoed loudly.
But there wasn’t too much time to dwell on year-old hockey—the action in the present was so lively that the stress overcame everything, even the fear. Every moment had the potential for that all-important game winner. Taking your eyes off the game, even for a moment, was risky. Viewers were rewarded with scores of brilliant saves, both teams successfully killing 5-on-3 penalties, and end-to-end rushes.
The overtimes belonged to the goalkeepers. Desbiens and Gwyneth Philips traded save after save, pushing their team to find another shot, and another, and another. At Place Bell, fans took to chanting Desbiens’s name. After a second entire game’s worth of hockey was complete, I wondered if it would ever end.
As the overtimes stretched on and I fought the urge to bang my head against a wall until it ran the color of Montreal’s jerseys, I was struck by how difficult it must have been for the players to stay focused. The game had started at 2:08 p.m. and now the sun was setting—five-and-a-half hours of commitment, through the gut punch of two late goals and the slog of quadruple overtime.
More than 75 minutes into overtime, Kristin O’Neill intercepted Ottawa’s attempt to exit their defensive zone and passed the puck cleanly to an onrushing Catherine Dubois. Dubois calmly received the puck and slotted it over Philips’s outstretched hand. Place Bell erupted, and maroon jerseys piled onto the ice. It took everything and then some, but Montreal had removed its monkey, if not yet slain it.
As this exhausted bunch heads to Ottawa for what is now a best-of-three, a few numbers illuminate just how deep Montreal had to dig for this win. Thirteenth forward Mikyla Grant-Mentis received 17 minutes of ice time, as opposed to Charge counterpart Taylor House’s three seconds. Erin Ambrose’s defensive composure was all the more impressive considering she kept it up for 58 minutes—the most of any skater on either team. Desbiens’s league-record 63 saves would be unfathomable if I hadn’t watched each one in focused agony.
But records will be broken. It’s the emotions of the match that will stick with the Victoire, and with me, just like the sting of last year’s sweep by Boston has never really left. I’ll never forget that nearly catatonic disbelief when Dubois scored—Was that real? Am I dreaming? Thankfully, she seemed to be able to enjoy it: “It’s just fun to win hockey games, so I’m just happy.”
After Game 1, a frustrated Stacey had told reporters, “It hurts. Losing hurts.” Perhaps, in playoff hockey, winning has to hurt too.
