My trip to Chicago started at 4:15 a.m. on a Thursday morning, when I had to wake up and get to the airport to catch our 6 a.m. flight to Minneapolis.

Despite our efforts, my mom, Linda Kolpitcke, and I almost missed the plane due to trouble checking my hockey equipment bag. It didn’t help that the Billings Airport doesn’t open until 5 a.m., which is unfortunate if your plane leaves at 6.

The flight to Minneapolis was smooth. The most disappointing, however trivial, part of the trip was when I found out I didn’t have a little window through which to see the clouds.

After landing in Minneapolis, we only had a 30-minute layover between flights, but we managed to make it with the help of a airport cart. Along this short journey through the airport, I discovered I should never,ever be allowed to drive a cart through an airport. Every time the driver slowed down and kindly asked people to move, my impulse was to swerve around them and speed up around tight corners and through masses of people.

We landed in Green Bay, Wis., where we were staying for the night with our cousins. We had to gather up all our bags from baggage claim; do some searching for my hockey sticks that got sent to a different place in the airport. We met my cousins at the Olive Garden and spent the rest of the night hanging out with them and their four month old son.

We woke up the next morning (not as early as before) and left for the University of Wisconsin for a college visit.

And that night, we finally ended up in Chicago, the destination of this whole trip.
Overnight it snowed a good 3 inches and continued snowing all day. We were cooped up in the hotel since our game didn’t start until 3 p.m. The arena, with three sheets of ice and more than 16 locker rooms, was packed with people. Hockey bags lay strewn along the walls. NHL games played on TVs hanging above the concession stands.

After the game being delayed 30 minutes, it finally started. It was a quick easy game against a Chicago team. My team, Team Wyoming, won 7-1 and the other team only got off 7 shots on net compared to our 22.

The next game was against St. Louis. We’d already played St. Louis once this season and lost pretty badly. One of our players broke her wrist after a dirty hit by the St. Louis assistant captain. So, before we started, they were already in our heads. We came out and played a good game but spent most of the game with at least one girl in the penalty box. Playing down one or two people meant the game was mostly in my end ( I’m the goalie). I had shot after shot. In the end, my team couldn’t keep up with St. Louis and we lost 3-1.

Our hatred toward that team only grew after that game. We sat in the locker room after the final buzzer, music blaring, ranting about the game and the players and the refs and basically everything. But, fortunately, we are pretty good at focusing our anger. We came out for the next game ready to play. We won 5-2 against the Naperville Sabres. The other Team Wyo goalie played this game, at least for the first 39 minutes. I finished the last 2 minutes after she got hurt in a pileup.

That win took us to the quarterfinals against the St. Jude Knights. We won that game 5-1, controlling the puck most the game and getting off 28 shots compared to their 20.
Unfortunately, our time in the tournament ended the next game when we lost to the Chicago Bruins 1-0. We placed 5th out of 16 teams and made it farther in the tournament than any of the other three western U.S. teams.

The disappointment was quickly forgotten in the chaos of getting back to the airport to be ready to fly. This meant repacking my hockey bag in a very specific and orderly process that included sitting on the bag to get it to zip. This provided my team with some good entertainment for about 10 minutes.

After all the stress and struggle to get to the airport on time, my mom and I were delayed until 9:30 p.m., leaving us stranded in a small airport with one restaurant and one vending machine for about five hours. Eventually we ended up in Minneapolis, but since we’d missed the connecting flight that’s where we stayed for the night. We finally arrived back in Powell the next day, though we were missing my sticks. They had ended up in Spokane, Wash. after Houston, Texas, and Salt Lake City; how they ended up in these cities, I’ll never know.