MISSISSAUGA, Ont. — As Kaitlyn Lawes bent down and put her hands over her face, Team Kerri Einarson’s celebration was just about to start at the other end of the ice.
There was heartbreak on one side, and jubilation on the other after a riveting, all-Manitoba Scotties Tournament of Hearts final.
Lawes’ “Hail Mary” runback in an extra end just didn’t have enough to knock an Einarson stone far enough, giving Team Canada a 4-3 win over a previously unbeaten Team Manitoba on Sunday night.
“All the heartbreak and all the work we put into it, this feels so amazing,” said Team Einarson lead Karlee Burgess. “To win my first one with these girls, I don’t want to swear, but it’s (expletive) awesome.”
Burgess, who joined the team last year, was on Jennifer Jones’ side when Einarson beat that Manitoba rink in the 2023 Scotties final for her fourth national title in a row.
No. 5 for Einarson didn’t come easy. After one-sided losses to Lawes in the round-robin and the Page 1-2 game the previous night, Einarson looked like she was going to let the final slip away.
Lawes battled back to take a 3-2 lead after falling behind 2-0 on a pair of Einarson steals in the first half of the game. In the 10th, Lawes had all the pressure on Einarson.
With Lawes sitting four, Einarson’s only option with last rock was to play an angle raise off her own guard to run it back into Lawes’ rock sitting on the button.
Einarson was money, sending the game to extras. Calm, cool and collected, she raised her broom while barely showing any emotion on her face as the crowd of 4,008 roared after the shot of the tournament.
“I just thought ‘do this for your teammates, Kerri,’” Einarson said. “They need you here. We’ll take this to an extra and we’ll go from there. It was called amazing, thrown great and the girls just swept it.”
“She saved us,” said Einarson’s second Shannon Birchard, who won her sixth Scotties title to tie Colleen Jones, Jennifer Jones and Jill Officer for most in history.
“We needed that. If she didn’t make that, we lost. That was clutch and then we put together a great extra end, did everything we could there and came out with the win.”
Burgess, Birchard and third Val Sweeting seemed to make everything in the extra end, getting the eventual winning rock behind cover. Lawes was just light on a draw on her first shot in the 10th and then couldn’t produce a miracle on last rock.
For Lawes, Selena Njegovan, Laura Walker and Kristin Gordon, it was a devastating loss. The team was just one win away from becoming the fifth squad to go perfect to win the Scotties since the playoff era started in 1979.
The team stuck together through the entire quadrennial, and was on the verge of finally getting over the hump at a big event before Einarson’s heroics.
“Don’t really have any words, to be honest,” said Lawes, who fell just short in her bid to get a second Scotties title after capturing her last one in 2015 as a third with Jennifer Jones.
“I’m super proud of my team for the incredible week we had. It’s obviously not the way we hoped it would end. This one’s going to sting for a while.”
Einarson, meanwhile, returned to the top of the podium after losing last year’s Scotties final to Rachel Homan. Two-time reigning champion Homan is heading to the Winter Olympics to represent Canada and missed this event, making Einarson Team Canada at the Scotties.
Einarson’s team will now be Team Canada at the world women’s championship in Calgary in March. She topped out with bronze in 2023 and 2022 and missed the podium in 2021 — while 2020 was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Wearing the Maple Leaf in my home province is a dream come true and something I’ll cherish for a long time,” Sweeting, an Alberta native, said.
Sweeting and her teammates also should cherish what was a very special victory on Sunday.
“Amazing,” Einarson said. “We’ve battled so hard all week and so proud of my teammates for sticking in there with me.”
