The conference championship earned them an automatic bid to the NCAA national tournament, a fact that still felt slightly unreal to Reese every time she said it out loud — Northbridge, a program that had spent most of its history hovering in respectable mid-conference obscurity, suddenly one of sixteen teams left standing in the country, with a real, legitimate shot at a national title.
The week between the championship and their first tournament game passed in a strange, suspended blur — practices sharper and more focused than usual, media requests multiplying by the day, a level of attention neither Reese nor Cole had fully experienced before this season. ESPN ran a short feature on the "historic Northbridge blue line," careful and mostly respectful this time, focused on hockey instead
