EXETER, Ont. — Five months after tearing her ACL, the first MVP in the history of the Professional Women’s Hockey League was skating alone in a community rink.
While most PWHL players were gearing up for the 2024-25 season in late October, Natalie Spooner was gliding down the ice and balancing on her surgically repaired knee at the South Huron Recreation Centre — an arena over 30 miles away from her home in London, Ont.
It was repetitive, unglamorous work. It’s also atypical for elite hockey players to be back to the basics one month before their season starts.
But these were among the necessary steps in Spooner’s road back to the Toronto Sceptres lineup, which came to its conclusion on Tuesday night against the Minnesota Frost.
The game — where she played 21 minutes and tallied an assist in a 3-2 overtime win — was the culmination of nine months of relentless work and tedious rehabilitation after her season ended in Game 3 of the 2024 PWHL playoffs.
“It just took a lot of time and a lot of rehab,” Spooner said. “It’s all time-consuming.”
And it wasn’t even the first time in the last two years that Spooner has had to claw her way back to playing.
In April 2023, Spooner made an ambitious return to the Canadian women’s national team only four months after…
