Game 19: Montreal (10-3-1-4, 37 pts, 1st) vs. Boston (6-5-2-6, 30 pts, 3rd)
Bell Centre
Start time: 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT
In Canada: CBC (English), Radio-Canada (French)
In the United States: NESN
Streaming: YouTube (USA/International), CBC Gem (Canada)
Laura Stacey still remembers her first shift at the Bell Centre.
“Me, Kristen [O’Neill], and Marie were on a line together and we literally had a 15 second shift, dumped it in, all came back to bench and said ‘oh my gosh’,” Stacey remembered after practice on Friday. “We had to just take a deep breath, we couldn’t breathe, there was so much happening, so many emotions, especially after that standing ovation that she [Poulin] got in the starting lineup.”
“I think it was for the first time, ‘woah this is incredible, this is record breaking’,” she continued. “You see people crying in the stands. I think we were so full of emotions that we had no sense of what our body was doing out there, so we were just ‘OK, get it in, get off, and take a deep breath’.”
The emotions weren’t only in the stands and on the ice, they were behind the bench too.
“When they announced [Poulin], in that moment I was fighting back a little bit of emotion there,” said Montreal head coach Kori Cheverie. “I’ve seen it all, I’ve lived through all the moments of women’s hockey since I fell in love with the game so to be in that moment… I could feel it for all of them because I had been dreaming of that my whole life as well.”
One of the lasting images of the game at the Bell Centre last year was Erin Ambrose looking around as she was jumping on the ice. Ambrose also scored the team’s second goal of the game that forced overtime.
“That one hit home for a lot of different reasons,” Ambrose said. “It meant a lot to our group, to be able to get a point out of that game.”
It was also her last PWHL goal, having yet to score this season.
“It would be nice to be able to fin