The championship trophy sat in Whitfield's office for exactly one week before the athletic department scheduled an official celebration — a proper ceremony held in Founders' Arena itself, the entire community invited, local media covering an event that had, over the course of the season, become about far more than just hockey.
Rae stood at the podium set up at center ice, looking out at a crowd that filled the arena to capacity once again, and felt the specific vertigo of realizing exactly how much this moment mattered to people who'd never touched a hockey stick in their lives, simply because her presence on this ice had, apparently, meant something larger than she'd ever fully understood while living through the daily grind of the season itself.
"I want to say something," she began, he
