Scarborough’s Natalie Spooner pulled off the rarest of hockey feats – the Olympic gold medal and the Clarkson Cup, the latter of which is the women’s version of the Stanley Cup.
The Cedarbrae Collegiate grad closed out her memorable season, sharing the Clarkson Cup with her teammates after her club team – the Toronto Furies – won the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) championship game 1-0 in overtime over the Boston Blades in Markham.
The golden goal came 33 seconds into overtime, the first of the four-day tournament by Britni Smith, with Spooner drawing an assist along with Carolyne Prevost.
Backed by the stellar goaltending of Christina Kessler, who was named tournament MVP, the Furies managed to rein in the cup while scoring only seven goals in four games – and that includes an overtime shootout winner by Spooner.
Spooner added another game-winning goal along with three assists to lead her team in scoring with five points. Another Olympic gold medalist, defenceman Tessa Bonhomme, who was controversially left off the Sochi squad, was second in scoring for the team with three assists.
The CWHL has five teams and in order of their regular season finish they are: Montreal Stars (42 points), Boston Blades (26), Calgary Inferno (25), Toronto Furies (23) and Brampton Thunder.
The championship format had the top four teams playing a round robin. In short, Boston won all the their preliminary round games and Calgary none. Fittingly, Toronto and Montreal (which both lost to Boston, but won over Calgary) closed out their round robin schedule against each other – with the winning team advancing to the championship game against Boston. And Toronto won 2-1 in an overtime shootout with Spooner assisting on the first goal and then scoring the lone shootout goal.
The CWHL played most of the season without their Canadian Olympic team members as they were all centralized in Calgary to prepare for Sochi - but teams were allowed to ‘reserve’ a couple of spots. And Spooner was one of the Olympic gold medalists to rejoin their club teams late in the season.
"I came back because I enjoy the game and want to have fun (and) try to help my team win a Clarkson Cup," she said in an interview posted on the league’s website.