She played the game the way the rink taught her growing up in Minnesota, heads-up, spatially exact, with a scorer's instinct and a grinder's willingness to go where the play was dangerous. She finished her time at Minnesota Duluth as its all-time leading scorer and accumulated ten World Championship medals over more than a decade, the kind of sustained excellence that doesn't come from peaking once but from showing up, year after year, prepared.

She gave birth to her daughter Madison in January 2001 and was back competing at the national team level that same year. Her son Cullen was born in January 2007, and then she went to Vancouver in 2010 as the only mother on the team and led it in goals with six, her 11 points co-leading the squad to a silver medal. She was named to the tournament's media All-Star team. Teammates called her "Mom." The girl who saw a poster and decided it was meant for her went on to do something no one had mapped out yet, win at the highest level, twice, while raising children, in a sport that had no infrastructure for either. She made the blueprint as she went.