Before the puck dropped on a must-win Game 3 in the PWHL Walter Cup final, Ottawa Charge head coach Carla MacLeod stood on the bench and took in her surroundings.
Her team was facing elimination, but MacLeod felt gratitude to be there.
“How is this my job?” MacLeod wondered to herself, as she looked around a packed and loud Canadian Tire Centre. “What a gig I’ve got.”
The Charge didn’t let a playoff-record crowd of 16,894 people down.
Ottawa mounted a comeback late in the third period, scoring two goals in about five minutes to defeat the Montreal Victoire, 2-1.
The Victoire lead the best-of-five series, 2-1, with Game 4 returning to Ottawa on Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET. Once again, it will be win or go home for the Charge.
But this team thrives around that mentality. It feels comfortable playing the underdog.
Resilience is baked into the Charge’s DNA, and has been all season long. They don’t care whether they’re trailing, nor do they care whether you think they’ll lose.
“Going into this season, there were some doubts about our team and what we could accomplish,” said Charge forward Rebecca Leslie, who scored the game-winning goal in front of her hometown crowd. “I think that we proved everyone wrong. We continuously just worked hard. We never quit.”
Ottawa stays alive in PWHL final, Leslie scores winner in final minute over Montreal
Montreal’s Hayley Scamurra opened the scoring with less than 13 minutes left in regulation, off a puck that bounced off the arena’s boards and directly to her stick.
Some teams might have panicked. Instead, MacLeod used a TV timeout to remind her team that it wasn’t over yet.
“It’s typical Carla,” Leslie said. “She just believes in us, and she knows that we can continue to push. At that point, there was a lot of time left in the game, so we knew that we could be calm and kind of just take on every couple minutes.”
With five-and-a-half minutes to go in the game, rookie Peyton Hemp scored her first career playoff goal to tie the game.
Then, with 56 seconds left, Leslie’s winner skirted through traffic in front and past Montreal goaltender, Ann-Renée Desbiens.
It wasn’t immediately confirmed as a goal. For several excruciating minutes, the Charge waited for the league’s central situation room to review the play. The officials were looking at whether there was a missed stoppage of play — specifically, whether there was a hand pass from captain Brianne Jenner’s glove.
The review was inconclusive. Once it was announced as a good goal, the crowd erupted.
“Every goal that we score in Ottawa, it feels like a big goal because our fans are so awesome,” Leslie said.
It was the fourth goal Leslie has scored over seven games in this post-season, but she said it was the biggest of her career, so far.
It’s the latest feat in what has been a career year for Leslie, all while playing in front of her hometown fans.
For years, she wasn’t sure this moment would come. She won a championship with the Canadian Women’s Hockey League’s Calgary Inferno in 2019, only for the league to shut down at the end of that season.
It was years of pushing through, working, and hoping.
“For me, there were some tough years of not knowing if I was going to ever play professionally, not knowing if it would work out,” Leslie said. “I just kept with it. I just kind of continued to battle and work on my skating or my stickhandling. To have this opportunity this year, it’s been a really special year.”
That persistence got her to this point, and bought the Charge another life in the Walter Cup final.
Ottawa Charge defeat Montreal Victoire to keep their Walter Cup dream alive
The relentlessness comes from the scrappiness of a player like Leslie, and the positivity of their coach, MacLeod, who described the season so far as “a treat.”
It’s a group that believes in each other and never gets divided, the coach said.
“To get in these moments where you’ve got to push back a little bit, everyone’s pulling for everyone to do well,” MacLeod said. “That’s a special feeling, and it’s certainly not lost on us that this group has that.”
Gwyneth Philips made 27 saves in the win, while Desbiens finished with 26 saves.
In a league with lots of parity between teams, goals are hard to come by. Every game in this series has been decided by just one goal.
Scamurra’s goal brought elation for the Victoire, but the momentum shifted after Hemp tied things up. Montreal never got the momentum back.
“We’re a team that has never been in this situation before, so I think it’s completely understandable to play maybe a little bit less composed in those moments,” Montreal head coach Kori Cheverie said. “Too many pucks kind of went back on to their tape. We’ll take a look at it and see what we need to re-jig.”
They’ll take another shot at clinching a championship on Wednesday.
They’ll be facing a desperate Ottawa team, again.
“It was about getting one in a row,” MacLeod said. “The reality is, we have to go get another one in a row.”
