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The family had trekked in through the snow from their hometown of Beauceville, Que. And they came with an army. They had reserved 90 seats for aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces to cheer on Marie-Philip.

Near the end of the game, Bisson suddenly appeared on the arena’s Jumbotron. Victoire announcer Maude Lanteigne asked the family matriarch to judge supporters in the crowd flexing their muscles via the “flexcam.” A woman with bulging biceps and arms covered in tattoos won the contest, as DJ Montana blasted the Olivia Newton-John hit Physical.

Still on the big screen, Bisson took a moment to blow kisses to her granddaughter. The camera went straight to Marie-Philip, who flashed a bright smile behind her hockey helmet then blew a kiss back to her grand-maman. The arena erupted in applause. And the tender moment between the 92-year-old and the superstar would go viral.

Over the coming days, all eyes will be on Marie-Philip Poulin at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics as she leads a Canadian team hungry to defend its Olympic gold medal. Only this time, Marie-Philip and her team of Olympic veterans will need to prevail over a younger and talented U.S. women’s hockey team built to take home the gold. For her fifth — and perhaps final — Games, Marie-Philip’s Team Canada is the underdog.

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“For sure, you don’t want to disappoint,” Marie-Philip says, acknowledging the weight of a nation. “You want to do well. Using this pressure on the positive side, for me, fuels my fire every day.”

At 34, Marie-Philip is arguably the best player in women’s hockey history, a generational star whose performance over a career spanning 15 years has earned her numerous international accolades and awards, including, most recently, MVP of the inaugural 2024-25 PWHL season, where she led the league in goals scored. Her best moments are the biggest moments, earning her the nickname “Captain Clutch.” She is the only player — male or female — who has scored in four Olympic gold-medal games.

There is even a Marie-Philip Poulin Barbie in her honour. The raw talent is in her bones, but the stuff that sets her apart — her resilience, unwavering work ethic and humility — comes from her roots in Beauceville, and her family’s supersized support.

“At the end of the day, I really learned from my parents not to take anything for granted, to work hard and continue being who you are,” Poulin says.

Team Canada goaltender and friend Ann-Renée Desbiens, dubbed the “Wall of Charlevoix” for her impenetrable goaltending, chuckles when asked about Poulin’s family. “For them, despite all the success she’s had, she’ll always remain that little girl from Beauce.”

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‘I fell in love with hockey’

An hour’s drive south of Quebec City, Beauceville is a town of approximately 6,300 people, divided in half by the Chaudière River. On the west side of the river is Beauceville’s new arena, opened in 2021. Local officials had considered calling it the “Marie-Philip Poulin Arena,” but Quebec rules forbid using the name of a living person to designate a public site.

Instead, Beauceville’s greatest hockey legend is displayed on four large posters outside the arena. Inside, visitors are greeted by two other pictures of Marie-Philip Poulin on the ice, one in the entrance with the words, “The dream starts here. Welcome to our arena!” and the other one pointing towards the exit with, “In victory or in defeat, the dream continues… (Have a) good trip back home!” Both are accompanied with the athlete’s signature.

Marie-Philip’s parents live across the river in a modest cosy home on top of a hill. Sitting at the kitchen table, Robert Poulin and Danye Nadeau describe their daughter as an active child who loved playing outside. Nadeau jokes that her husband was often excused from washing the dishes because their daughter was always dragging him outside.

As a little girl, Marie-Philip constantly followed her father around, copying him. When he mowed the lawn, she would take out her toy lawn mower and do the same. And when he would take his shirt off while mowing the lawn, she would take hers off, too.

At around three or four years old, Marie-Philip started figure skating classes. Her parents quickly realized it was not the right fit for her. For the class’s year-end performance, the little boys were to be dressed up as firefighters, while the little girls were to wear doll costumes. Marie-Philip despised dolls and refused to put on the doll costume.

Her father served as a volunteer firefighter, and the little girl wanted to be a firefighter like the boys, recalled her mother. “In the end, I made sure she was a firefighter because that was really her wish.”

Marie-Philip also wanted to play hockey like her older brother, Pier-Alexandre. He went on to play junior hockey and now enjoys a coaching career. In recent months, he has been quietly training Italy’s women’s hockey team for the 2026 Olympics and will be their assistant coach during the Games.

When Pier-Alexandre practised at the local arena, instead of going off to play with the other players’ little sisters, Poulin would sit on the bench between her parents and carefully watch the game. On the ride home, she would discuss with her brother what went on during the game in detail, her mother says.

“It was so funny to hear. Sometimes I would look at Robert and ask him, ‘Where does all this come from?’ This was a five- or six-year-old kid who was talking to her brother.”

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So, her parents bought her some used hockey gear at a flea market and signed her up for a boys team.

Nadeau said Marie-Philip was probably five years old when she played hockey for the first time. “She was good. She was so good — it was incredible. She was better than all the little boys that were there. She had a natural talent.”

“I fell in love with hockey and I haven’t looked back even once,” says Marie-Philip.

Juggling jobs to keep the kids playing

With Pier-Alexandre and Marie-Philip both in hockey, their parents had to juggle two or three jobs each to make ends meet.

Their mother worked as an administrative assistant for the local hospital during the day. In the evenings, sometimes until 1 a.m., she would write articles or enter hockey statistics as communications officer for the Beauce-Amiante hockey league. The money she made from that went directly to pay her children’s hockey registration fees.

Their father worked as a stretcher-bearer at the hospital, served as a volunteer firefighter and took on some handyman work on weekends.

The rest of the time, both parents would be busy driving their children to hockey practice, games and tournaments.

If the children wanted new hockey equipment, that was their Christmas gift. If it was a more expensive piece of equipment, it was their Christmas and birthday gift combined. Other than a few camping trips, the family took no vacations.

During hockey tournaments, other players and their families would eat at a restaurant, but the Poulin family would eat in their car in the parking lot from a cooler filled with sandwiches and Gatorade. Marie-Philip said she sometimes wondered why she couldn’t be with the others, but “at the end of the day, we were playing hockey and that was the most important thing.”

Marie-Philip could only play in the AA hockey league every other year because the fees were too expensive, her mother said. Other years, she would play in a lower-level league, which meant they wouldn’t have to travel far for games and tournaments.

In the years when Marie-Philip had to leave the AA team, coaches would tell Nadeau to make sure her daughter knew that it wasn’t due to a lack of talent, it was her family’s decision for financial reasons.

“But Marie would still leave their office crying,” her mother says.

Pier-Alexandre shares one post-game discussion with his parents when he was a young teen. It was a Saturday morning, and he’d played in Charlevoix, northeast of Quebec City, about an hour and a half drive from home. By his own account, he had not played well.

He remembers coming back to the car and his parents asking if he still wanted to play hockey. “I said, ‘Of course. Why?’ They said, ‘We won’t drive an hour and a half, like we did this morning, and have three jobs for you to not work harder than everyone else.’

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“It definitely stuck with me. I still remember that discussion,” he says, adding that his sister was in the car with them when it took place.

“It was the right thing to do. After that, they never had to tell me again to work hard, to work harder. It never became a problem again for me or Marie-Philip.”

Marie-Philip says she will forever be grateful for everything her parents did so that their children could play hockey.

“Sometimes, when you’re younger, you don’t realize all those efforts, but as you grow up, you just tell yourself, ‘Wow, they did so much.’”

As for Pier-Alexandre, he says he is proud to see his sister remain humble through it all.

“She knows it wasn’t easy for us to get here.”

Competitive siblings

Marie-Philip played hockey exclusively with boys until the age of 15. But her first and favourite adversary was her older brother.

As children, they would often play hockey in their unfinished basement. Their parents would cover the pipes with Styrofoam so they wouldn’t burst with an errant slapshot. Eventually, there were so many holes in the walls that their parents had to renovate the entire basement.

Their mother jokes that she used to own a bookcase with glass doors — until there was no more glass. “It was just a part of life with kids,” she says with a laugh. “We had to get used to it and live with it.”

Pier-Alexandre says his sister was forever after him to play hockey. He would eventually relent, on the condition that she be the goaltender. Even in that role, she was good.

“She’s really one of the best natural athletes I’ve seen in my life,” her brother says.

Despite a three-year age gap, he says his relationship with his sister was very competitive. It took her years before she could beat him in certain sports, but she would never stop trying and would always insist they keep score. “She couldn’t help herself. You could see that her objective was to be able to beat me one day,” Pier-Alexandre says.

At the local arena, however, Pier-Alexandre would take on the role of protective big brother. To Marie-Philip’s credit, he says, she always carved out her own space on teams.

“I think that what clubs and parents appreciated was that not only was she contributing to the team’s success, but she was also someone who worked very hard, who was humble, who knew her place. If she had acted cocky after scoring two goals, I think the little boys would have been annoyed,” he says. “I think her humility comes from there.”

Her mother says that playing against boys helped shape her daughter’s hockey skills. Marie-Philip had to learn to skate fast to not get checked into the boards. “It stepped up her game,” says Nadeau.

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Marie-Philip says she was sometimes targeted by opponents on the ice for being the only girl. “I would get picked on, but I would get up faster than I fell.”

Even so, her parents took extra precautions to ensure she was safe. Before every game, they would contact the arena where the game was taking place to ask for a key to a separate changing room for their daughter. Many arenas did not have separate changing rooms, so Marie-Philip would find herself in the first aid room. After every game, her parents would guard the door to make sure their daughter could change or shower undisturbed.

It was only when Marie-Philip joined Quebec’s U18 AAA league — considered the highest level of youth hockey for players with college or professional potential — at the age of 15 that she started to doubt her future in men’s hockey, according to her brother.

She would have been the first female to have played at that level. Some players felt she was taking a guy’s place. She had a bull’s-eye on her back.

“These were not boys anymore — they were men,” says her mother. “I didn’t want her to get killed.”

‘A dominant player’

Peter Smith, who was assistant coach on the 2010 Canadian Olympic team, remembers the first time he saw Marie-Philip Poulin play. She might have been 14 or 15 years old.

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“I mean, she was just a dominant player,” he says. “She was strong and fit and fast and skilled, and she was way ahead of most of the players of her own age, and even players who are older than she was.”

She did not speak a lot of English at the time, and Smith recalls her being quite shy. “But you could tell that she was a really good young person and wanted to learn.”

In 2007, professional women’s ice hockey was taking shape with the creation of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) and its newly formed Montreal Stars, which would become the Montreal Canadiennes.

Sixteen-year-old Marie-Philip saw an opportunity to move to the big city and play hockey. But she would have to convince her parents first.

Her mother wanted to make sure that she would be “carded” by Hockey Canada, meaning she would be receiving financial assistance, should she decide to move to Montreal.

“I told her, ‘If you’re not carded by Hockey Canada, forget it,’” Nadeau says.

Marie-Philip asked her coaching staff, who inquired if Smith thought she would be make the cut. He said yes. Pierre Rougeau, father of hockey player Lauriane Rougeau, who would also join the Montreal Stars, offered to have the young girl stay with them in Pointe-Claire.

By the next day, Nadeau says she was packing her young daughter’s bags and driving her to Montreal. “When I left her in Montreal, I cried so much.”

Marie-Philip says older Stars teammates, including legends Caroline Ouellette and Kim St-Pierre, treated her like their little sister, driving her everywhere, even when hockey practices were at 10 or 11 p.m.

Marie-Philip realized she had to learn English to make it on the Canadian team. To immerse herself, she did her last year of high school at Kuper Academy, a prestigious English private school on Montreal’s West Island, thanks to a hockey coach who managed to get her in despite a long wait-list.

It was a tall order for a teenager who, by her own admission, could only say the words “yes,” “no” and “toaster” in English when she left Beauceville.

“She’s exaggerating a little,” says her mother with a laugh. She says Marie-Philip had learned some basics in English in an enriched high school program at home. “But when you leave Beauce, you’re not bilingual.

“That year was incredibly stressful.”

But Marie-Philip did it, and then did a year at Dawson College in Montreal. She took a year off school so she could be in Calgary in time for team training for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

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Smith remembers a team-building challenge as part of the training in Calgary that involved speed golf. The idea was to finish playing nine holes in teams, as quickly as possible.

“I’m watching this girl swing a golf club, and I’m thinking, ‘Holy smokes, if she wasn’t a hockey player, she could be a pro golfer,’” he says. “She’s just a naturally gifted athlete.”

Beauceville rallied around Poulin

In December 2009, Beauceville was given the opportunity to host the Olympic flame. Marie-Philip’s mother said she got goosebumps when she saw it. “I felt something — it was so strong.”

At that moment, Marie-Philip’s parents were still waiting to hear if their daughter would make it to the national team.

The official announcement came just before Christmas. When her father went to work at the hospital the next day, he was wearing Marie-Philip’s No. 29 on his back.

Beauceville got into motion to support its 18-year-old Olympic athlete. The city distributed 75,000 placemats to local bars and restaurants with the dates of Team Canada games, according to media reports, as well as 4,000 stickers with No. 29 handed out at hockey tournaments.

The local arena also launched a fundraising campaign to help her parents travel to Vancouver to see their daughter play in person. They were there, along with Pier-Alexandre, on Feb. 25, 2010, for Canada’s gold-medal game against the United States.

“Just to see her in the warm-up on the ice, it hit me that my little sister was on Team Canada,” says Pier-Alexandre, who was playing for University of Moncton at the time. “She had realized her dream. And she hadn’t done anything yet.”

Before the game started, Pier-Alexandre says he tried to temper his parents’ expectations. Marie-Philip was a rookie player, he explained, so there was a chance she might not play much in the final game. They were the only three people in the Vancouver arena wearing her jersey.

But back in Beauceville, 1,000 people showed up at the rink to cheer their local celebrity on four giant screens. Nadeau called her brother, who was there. “I said, ‘Maybe she won’t even play. Why did you do all this?’” she told him.

Minutes later, Canada scored their first goal. It was Marie-Philip’s.

And then she scored again.

“The roof almost lifted because everyone was so euphoric,” says Nadeau.

There were still two periods left. The Americans never scored.

“Even back then, she just seems to rise to the occasion and produces in those moments where it really matters,” says coach Smith. “She was the Sidney Crosby of our team.”

“It’s hard to explain,” Pier-Alexandre says of his sister’s clutch moments. “Something flips inside Marie. She manages to take the game to the next level, and she always manages to make the difference. It’s impressive.”

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Leading teammates by example

In 2024, Marie-Philip Poulin married the love of her life, Team Canada and PWHL teammate Laura Stacey. Together, they share a golden retriever named Arlo.

Pier-Alexandre credits Stacey with giving his sister a second wind as an athlete.

For his part, he can’t keep up with her anymore. “Today, if I work out with her, I can’t walk for a week.”

Marie-Philip and Stacey train every day, even while on vacation. “I think just that consistent willingness to do what it takes, the consistent willingness to prepare more than anybody else has, I think that’s ultimately what sets you apart at the end of the day. And I’ve been able to see it firsthand,” says Stacey of her partner.

“When you see the amount of work she puts in, when you see the attention to detail, the willingness to learn and consistently get better, it completely makes sense.”

Goaltender Desbiens, who spends a lot of time with both of them, says she has never seen two people compete as much against each other.

If Stacey beats Marie-Philip during a sprint contest at the gym, Marie-Philip will want a rematch, and vice versa, says Desbiens, to the point their coaches have to physically separate them — or they would still be sprinting, days later.

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“I think that even drinking a glass of milk is a competition at home,” Desbiens says.

As a leader, Marie-Philip is mostly the silent type, and tends to lead by example with her unfaltering work ethic, says Desbiens. If Marie-Philip knows she has to spend 12 hours on a television set one day to record a commercial, she will get up at 4 a.m. to squeeze in a workout beforehand.

“It’s important to understand that the success that she enjoys does not just happen.”

Stacey addresses the question of whether this will be their last Olympics. She says they talk about it a lot. But no decision has been made.

“At the end of the day, I think where we’re both at in our career — and her especially — is to enjoy every single present moment,” Stacey says.

For Milan, Marie-Philip’s fifth Olympics, Beauceville will once again encourage businesses, schools and residents to show support for their homegrown hero. “We’re going into ‘Marie-Philip’ mode,” says Paul Morin, the town’s director of communications.

Team Canada’s women’s hockey games will be broadcast at the local arena, with more elaborate entertainment planned for the semifinal and final games. The women’s gold-medal game takes place Feb. 19.

‘This little girl has gone far’

In early January, before all the Olympic hype has started, grand-maman Julienne Bisson is sitting on her couch in Beauceville, looking proudly at the portrait of Marie-Philip on her side table. It’s the day after the big game in Quebec City, and her viral moment on the jumbo screen blowing a kiss to her granddaughter.

Amused, Bisson says a little girl came up to her during the game after she saw her on the big screen and asked if she could touch her. “These children know who Marie-Philip is. They want to follow her example.”

Bisson is beaming as she explains how her granddaughter has turned her into a hockey enthusiast. The 92-year-old will be watching Marie-Philip take to the ice again for Canada in Milan-Cortina, hoping she brings back another Olympic gold medal to the town that launched her.