Reading · Annette Januzzi Wick - Morning Finds

I admit it. When the quarterfinals for women’s hockey at the 2026 Olympics included a matchup between the Italian team against Team USA, I couldn’t look away. My cheers rang out—for the Italian team. I was somewhat like Ellen Giu, the Chinese American freestyle skier who competed for China because she wanted people to know there’s more to her country than the news reports—torn between two prides. The final score of 6-0 proved Team USA didn’t need my enthusiasm, scoring more goals than Italy had shots on goal.

In the end, the match reeled me. I became obsessed with the sport of hockey played by someone like my younger self in this country of ours.

I grew up just outside of Cleveland. However, the city had no professional hockey teams during my formative years, other than the short-lived NHL Cleveland Barons (1976–1978) and the WHA Cleveland Crusaders (1972–1976). I moved to Cincinnati after college. The ECHL Cyclones were fun to watch at the old Gardens. Over the years, my husband and I have meandered down to the riverbanks and Heritage Bank Center on a wintry night to watch NCAA frozen four matchups, like one between Notre Dame and Denver. The Cyclones have hosted a “throw stuffed animals on the ice” night (a respectable spectacle) and for New Year’s Eve, shot off indoor fireworks, in which we watched closely for sparks to fly. (Only later did we learn about the Swiss resort catastrophe).

During a recent matchup, the Cyclones tied the game. The game went into double overtime. Power plays developed. I began to understand why. There were fouls of tripping, holding, slashing, all sorts of gerunds implying ferocity. And boarding - a penalty assessed when a player violently checks, pushes, or trips an opponent sending them into the boards at a dangerous angle.

I weighed in aloud on penalties as if I understood, but really, no more so than the concept of offsides in soccer. I am the Ted Lasso of hockey.

Hockey was foreign to me. Ice skating was not. My siblings and I grew up skating on a makeshift pond at the Golden Acres sanitarium behind our home whenever their retention fields froze over. Owing to the family shoe business and the accessibility of skates, various sizes were abundant our home. The ice never lasted long, but we certainly tried our hand at twists and turns. But winter sports were for the Olympics. We had no knowledge hockey was a competitive youth sport. The Miracle on Ice came later.

Now? The only miracle is how hockey as a sport for women evaded me. Would I have have played? Doubtful. But I’m mystified as to when were these young women toiling in the rink? How had I lost track of such accomplishments on ice? What drove them to rink? Why did they stay?

At the 2026 Olympics, Team USA in women’s hockey outscored their opponents 33 - 2 in total goals. (The men team numbers were 26, compared to their opponents 2 in total. And, the women have won three gold medals (2026, 2018, 1998) four silver medals (2002, 2010, 2014, 2022) and one bronze medal (2006).

During the drought between rounds of the women’s televised Olympic hockey matchups, I dove into the background on the players. And found myself there.

Laila Edwards was a Cleveland girl. I’m one too. She’s from Cleveland Heights, where they call her the Queen of Cleveland. Her father, as told by my cousin, was a young cook at a restaurant where she once worked. Uncannily, another skater from Ohio, Gwyn Phillips, became instantly familiar when Facebook’s algorithm fed me a post referencing a classmate of mine. Said classmate, Linda, was Gwyn’s mother. Linda was a petite young woman who sat next to me in high school band. We both played the flute. High school was possibly the last time I saw her. Now, her 25-year-old daughter, at 5’7” and 7 or 8 years older than the age of when I last saw her mother, donned gear that weighed a third of her body weight, about 45 pounds (each leg pad weighs about five pounds), creating that fearsome appearance and performance as goalie. Gwyn’s instrument wasn’t the flute, but a stick and puck, more so the stopping of one. And also, she has a pizza named after her in Athens.

Had I not been cheering for Italy, I would have noticed Gwyn’s saves. She recorded 20 of them in the win against Switzerland and six against Italy. I would have seen Laila as more than a black female from Cleveland. And Haley Winn? Who didn’t want those three brothers of hers to also belong to them? If only every woman had this sort of brother in their corner. However, there was more to Haley than her social media-savvy brothers. And what about the thirty-three-year-old mother, with a two-and-a-half year old, Kendall Coyne Schofield. Could I have performed at that level with a toddler? Certainly not.

What struck me was their sheer okayness with the harshness of the sport, which was only a backdrop to how their blades were like lathes, turning that force into a beautiful dynamic of discipline and dance.

Questions circled me like Hilary Knight on the rink.

Who gave these young women the courage, the permission, to inflict such brute strength and gorgeous guile, to skate toward what some might consider an improbable goal (pun intended)? How did the shortest girl on the team, Cayla Barnes, 5’ 2”, who could have easily been me, perform at such expert levels?

How did my flute-playing, smiling classmate deal with Gwyn, with a similar smile, when she played hockey as a young girl?

My cousin, Paula, in town one past weekend, revealed how her daughter had once been enthralled with the sport. “Her dad played hockey, so we had both kids take skating lessons at a young age. She was a natural. She is extremely athletic, so she went to hockey camp when she was 6. Took off from there. The only girl on the team until she was 12.” The daughter stopped after that. At a time when boys become obnoxious. Where might she have gone if only there were more teams for girls? Or if only boys learned at an early to respect the girls.

Origin stories fascinate me. I want to know, when did you feel it, that inkling?

What was that inkling for young women and hockey? Young girls, really. Where did that originate from? For instance, Laila participated in public skate programs at the Cleveland Heights Community Center. Back, back. What did she tap into deep inside? What had she and the others received, in that time, that kept them safe enough, secure enough to focus, advance, compete?

On Thursday, February 19, Team USA women won their gold medal in hockey.

In an improbable twist of fate, that very day, the former Prince Andrew was arrested for suspicion of misconduct in a public office. An arrest made possible by bringing the Epstein files, containing countless emails, into the light. It’s unfortunate his arrest was not explicitly for the sexual assault he perpetrated upon a young Virginia Giuffre. As Andrew Mountbatten’s victim, Virginia (please read her memoir, Nobody’s Girl) is no longer alive to witness how this will play out.

Team USA women received their medals and a plush of Tina the Stoat (the winter mascot) and a small, impish character known as “Flo.” After, they took to the ice for the team photo shoot. The camera panned across each of their faces. Surprise, determination, joy. I snapped a picture of the group as it ran across my television screen to hold on to that feeling of invincibility. These 23 young women, girls still some, a few whose stories we had yet to know, how had they transformed themselves?

They had managed to avoid the worst possible case scenario that every parent fears when they send their daughter off to sports, school, college, or other, trusting in an adult in charge. That of sexual assault, rape, or death.

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My niece is an avid fan of Heated Rivalry, and of the UC’s men’s hockey team. She informed me, the ice rink with young men skating is often referred to as the boy aquarium. Once you know this, you can’t unknow it.

The members of the women’s hockey team had been provided a girl aquarium. Somewhere they felt safe enough to be themselves, to check others into the proverbial or actual boards. Someone would call foul, like any good referee, to prevent the worst from happening. And those who oversaw the programs, coaches, heads of the female hockey associations would know how to bring out the best in them. And protect them from the worst.

How was it the young girls, victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his circle of elites, weren’t offered that same aquarium to skate through life, and by that I mean to breathe, to learn, to grow. And fight whenever necessary?

We cheered for women’s hockey because they were branded USA. While the Epstein survivors and victims were branded liars—and worse. Yet they too are heroes, Olympic heroes, deserving of all the gold we can shower upon them, yet not even that will make them whole.

Epstein’s victims were just girls. No one gave them a stuffed animal for security or a rink to discover their strength. Not until now. Team USA women’s hockey offered them that boost. A way forward. To fight with all the power plays at their disposal, even if that means turning down an invite to the White House and little slamming into the boards.

Girl Aquarium

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