What came after took a different kind of toughness. In 2019, Carpenter was among the players who helped form the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association, stepping away from the existing professional league to play under its umbrella — exhibition games, tours, events built to demonstrate what the sport could look like when it was done right. It was an act of organization as much as conviction, a years-long public argument that women's hockey deserved better infrastructure. It worked. When the PWHL launched in 2024, she was one of its cornerstones, a face of the new league with the New York Sirens.

She is still in the middle of that journey, now with the Seattle Torrent. The arc of her career, from North Reading to Boston College to New York to Seattle, traces the sport's own uncertain path toward something sustainable. What's already clear is the consistency of her choices — on the ice and off it, she has repeatedly chosen the harder, more principled path, and the sport is better structured because she did.