The Girl who changed the Game のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 5

Monday came faster than I would have preferred.I spent Sunday doing what I always do when I'm nervous about something: I prepared obsessively and then told myself I wasn't nervous. I made a list of interview questions. I reorganized the list. I looked up Declan Mercer's stats from last season, which were and I say this with full journalistic objectivity annoyingly good. Forty three points in thirty one games. Conference rookie of the year. A quote in the campus paper from November where he said his goal for sophomore year was to "just play better hockey," which was either refreshingly unpretentious or deeply evasive depending on how charitable you were feeling.I was feeling professionally neutral.I also, at approximately eleven PM, found a video someone had posted on the athletics Instagram of him scoring a goal that involved skating around two defenders in a move that had no business being that fluid, set to a song that I would never admit made me watch it three times.Research.

Wednesday practice did not start well.This was my fault, which I'm noting upfront so nobody thinks I'm about to blame someone else for something that was objectively my fault. I set two alarms the night before five AM and five-fifteen, the backup system I'd been using since freshman year of high school and somehow, in the specific insanity of Tuesday night, I forgot that I'd silenced my phone during a film review session and never unsilenced it.I woke up at six oh seven.Practice started at six.I'm going to skip over the next eleven minutes because they were not my finest and I'd like to preserve some dignity here. What I will say is that I made it to the rink by six eighteen with my recorder, my notebook, my jacket on correctly, and my hair in a ponytail that was doing its best under the circumstances. I pushed through the rink doors with the energy of someone arriving casually, not someone who had jogged the last four blocks in twenty-two degree weather.The cold hit me like a wa