She played on the wing with a motor that coaches built game plans around, someone defenders knew would be there in the sixtieth minute exactly as fast as she'd been in the first. At North Carolina she won national championships before turning professional, and she carried that intensity into three Olympic gold medal runs and a World Cup title in 2015, spending over a decade as one of the most durable presences on a national team that churned through generations of talent around her. Her longevity was itself the story, a career that spanned multiple eras of the program without her ever losing the starting role she'd fought her way into as a teenager.

O'Reilly has been open about her Christian faith as central to how she approached the sport and how she has approached life after it, treating competition as something bound up with a larger sense of purpose rather than separate from it. Since retiring in 2016 she has moved into broadcasting, building a second career analyzing the sport she spent her playing years defined by relentlessness in.