The Montreal Victoire Make A Living As Champions

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 Wednesday night.