The team physician's report went to Whitfield the next morning, and by the time the bus pulled back into Ironbrook three days later, the decision had already been made and communicated through the careful, clinical language of an official medical hold: Rae Callahan would sit out a minimum of two weeks, participating in modified practice only, with a full return-to-play evaluation scheduled for early December.
The reaction from outside the team's tight circle was swift and, in some corners, exactly as ugly as Rae had feared.
"See what happens when you let a girl play contact hockey," read one comment beneath a sports blog's coverage of the news, one of hundreds in a similar vein that Priya had explicitly begged Rae not to read and that Rae had, predictably, read anyway. "Called it in Sept
