fastidious & precise

39. Easily beguiled. Usually caffeinated.

[meraki-yao]

So happy to see everyone call Marvel out on their bullshit

This is literally the entire comment section, I'm so proud

But seriously the audacity to post this in particular during Pride month

[inkededucatednnerdy]

@fishyandclintbarton not a straight bone in that photo

[puckszone]

what is zohran mamdani's plan for ending single ownership in the pwhl

[allthespoons]

NEW YORK — One month before the Professional Women’s Hockey League draft, Caroline Harvey and Laila Edwards were plotting.

After a whirlwind 2025-26 season, the duo were in New York as keynote speakers at the espnW summit. For over 30 minutes, they discussed winning Olympic gold medals with Team USA — where Edwards and Harvey were among the top scorers in the tournament — and their third national championship victory with the Wisconsin Badgers.

But after the panel was complete, their conversation turned to the future — and the fact that the two best friends will be separated for the first time in nearly a decade.

“That’s a lot of our conversations lately,” Harvey said in an interview with The Athletic last month.

At the 2026 PWHL Draft on Wednesday night, Harvey, who won Olympic MVP and the 2026 Patty Kazmaier Award as the top player in college hockey, is expected to go first overall to the Vancouver Goldeneyes. In a perfect world, Edwards, a 6-foot-1 dual threat who can play forward or defense, also lands in the Pacific Northwest, as the Seattle Torrent have the No. 2 pick. Their Team USA teammate Abbey Murphy, who was second in The Athletic’s prospect ranking in March, could also reasonably go second overall.

Both Edwards and Harvey have said they’d be happy to play anywhere in the PWHL.

Still, in the weeks since their decorated college careers ended, they have tried to game out scenarios where they end up on the same pro team next season. Maybe, they say, there will be a big draft-day trade. It happened in Vancouver before in the NHL. It could happen again.

Realistically, though, the best they’ll be able to do is meet for lunch.

“Once or twice we’ve been serious, like, ‘Yeah, this is it,’” Edwards said. “But then we come up with all these scenarios of how we’re still gonna see each other a lot.”

“If we’re both out west we’d be driving distance,” Harvey said. “We could meet for lunch on off days.”

To just call Edwards and Harvey best friends feels like a disservice to the nature of their connection. They’ve grown up together, going from high school to the Wisconsin Badgers and becoming Olympic gold medalists at each other’s side. Their families are so close that when Harvey won the Patty Kazmaier in March, Edwards’ 6-year-old nephew Shiloh joined the Harvey family picture. “(He’s) part of my family,” Caroline said.

Edwards and Harvey won three NCAA championships during their time with the Wisconsin Badgers.

Now, after years of playing together, eating every meal and spending nearly every minute together, Harvey and Edwards will soon go their separate ways.

“I think they’re really going to miss each other and I really hope that they’re not too far apart,” said David Harvey, Caroline’s father. “They’re best friends and I think they’ll be best friends for life even outside of hockey. They’re two different people and they just work because they love each other.”

When the duo first met, Edwards was 10. Harvey was 12, and wearing a standout matte black helmet over a classic bob cut with blunt bangs.

“That’s just how I remember her,” Edwards said. “She had these bangs, and the helmet was almost egg-shaped.”

It was an old Easton helmet that Harvey’s father found on a local sale rack when his daughter first got into hockey. David Harvey likened the helmet — which also had a half-cage, half-bubble mask — to the Great Gazoo’s helmet from “The Flintstones.” Not that he ever told his daughter that.

“She used to say people would make fun of the helmet,” David said. “And I’d be like, ‘No, it’s really cool!’”

Edwards also never said a word. She was admittedly pretty shy back then. And Harvey, who joined her Pittsburgh Penguins Elite girls hockey team for a tournament that summer, was already too good to chirp. Looking back on it now, though, Edwards said, “I should have chirped her.”

Less than a year later, Harvey was attending Bishop Kearney, an elite hockey prep school in Rochester, N.Y. Edwards, in seventh grade, was visiting the school as a prospective student.

As an eighth grader, Harvey — whose friends call her “KK” — served as Edwards’ host, showing her around the school and hockey facilities. Edwards followed Harvey to class and went on the ice with the team to get the full “day in the life” experience as a BK student athlete. They clicked right away and within a few hours, they were playing mini sticks in the hallway.

Edwards and Harvey both attended Bishop Kearney, an elite prep school known for developing talent headed to NCAA Division I women’s hockey programs.

“I don’t know how to describe it,” Harvey said. “It was just so light and easy. … It just made sense that we were such good friends right away.”

That summer, they landed on the same team again for the annual Beantown girls hockey showcase in Boston, and after one of the games, Harvey invited Edwards back to her home in New Hampshire to watch a movie. They can’t recall the exact movie; it was definitely a scary one, they say. But, they do know they’ve been best friends ever since.

When Edwards officially enrolled at Bishop Kearney in the fall, they became inseparable. For most students, Bishop Kearney is a private Catholic prep school. But for the 100-plus athletes who reside on campus, it’s also an elite hockey program with daily access to ice and training facilities, including a gym and multiple shooting rooms exclusive to players.

At 13 and 14 years old, Edwards and Harvey were away from home, living in the BK dorms, going to class together and playing on the same under-16 team.

“What the world is seeing of them today, from the TikTok videos, to on the ice, that’s been KK and Laila since seventh and eighth grade,” said Cari Coen, who has been the director of girls hockey at Bishop Kearney since 2018. “They share this unique bond of moving from home chasing these big goals at a very young age.”

For three years at Bishop Kearney, Harvey and Edwards were building their friendship while developing as young elite hockey players. Sometimes that meant walking to nearby Starbucks or Chipotle. Or pulling pranks on their teammates.

“Those two are very light-hearted and so funny,” said Coen. “They’re always looking for a laugh or being goofy.”

On the ice, though, Edwards and Harvey were special talents and already dominating their age group. They’d train every day together in the gym, on the ice and in the school’s stick handling and shooting room. All those early reps laid the groundwork for Harvey’s now lethal curl-and-drag from the blue line, and Edwards’ shot that made her one of the best goal scorers in the NCAA.

According to Coen, Edwards and Harvey’s work ethic helped shape the culture of a young program that has since become one of the key feeders into college hockey and now the PWHL.

Since it launched in 2016, the Bishop Kearney girls hockey program has sent 100 players to NCAA Division I programs, including Slovakian teen phenom Nela Lopušanová. Four alumni currently play in the PWHL, headlined by 2025 second-overall pick and Olympic gold medalist Haley Winn. Ten BK alums have declared for the 2026 draft, including Harvey, Edwards and Kirsten Simms, who is also projected to be a first-round pick.

“They had these big dreams and they just took the opportunity and ran with it,” said Coen. “They set the standard at BK. I don’t even think they know that, but it all started with those two.”

Over her four-year career at Bishop Kearney, Harvey scored 370 points in 254 games and developed into one of the very best offensive defenders in North America. She played on the American under-18 team in back-to-back seasons, winning a gold medal in 2020 as a top-three player on the team. By the time she was 18 years old, Harvey graduated to the senior women’s national team that won a silver medal at the 2021 Women’s World Championships.

Edwards’ own ascension was swift and undeniable. First, there was a growth spurt, where she went from 5-6 to around 5-10 between eighth and ninth grade. Her first tournament with USA Hockey, the 2022 U18 women’s worlds, came shortly after. And Edwards was a star, winning MVP and leading the tournament in goals.

In a bit of good luck, Harvey — who should have been a freshman at Wisconsin — took that season off to compete in the 2022 Beijing Olympics as a teenager, which meant the two best friends were able to start their college careers together.

At Wisconsin, they each established themselves as two of the biggest stars in college hockey — winning a national championship as freshmen — and as key building blocks for Team USA.

Edwards made her debut in November 2023, becoming the first Black woman to play for the U.S. senior women’s national team at the Canada-USA Rivalry Series. By then, Edwards had grown to 6-1 and came armed with an elite offensive toolkit.

None of that meant Edwards was a lock to make the upcoming women’s worlds roster, though. And on the final day before the team was to be named, her father Robert didn’t know what to expect.

Harvey, however, was confident and assured her friend’s parents: “Laila is going to make this team.”

“She was so enthusiastic and just behind Laila,” said Robert. “That has always stood out to me.”

As Harvey predicted, Edwards was named to the U.S. national team for 2024 women’s worlds in Utica, N.Y., and they went from best friends and college teammates to representing Team USA together on the international stage.

For the last two years, they’ve lived together at an apartment in Madison, conveniently close to LaBahn Arena, which is home to the Badgers women’s hockey team. They took a minimalist approach to designing the space with just three items on the walls: an Edwards jersey, a Harvey jersey and an Ice Spice poster.

“They had terrible style,” said David Harvey. “It was lacking some stuff, but it kind of fit their personality, like, ‘We sleep here, we live here and that’s good enough for us.’”

“They’re quite the duo,” said Edwards’ father David of the bond between Caroline and Laila.

The apartment served as a great home base. Almost every day, they’d go to practice and training with the top-ranked Badgers, split up for class, and meet back up at home, where they’d cook, watch movies and make the TikTok videos that have made them even more popular with women’s hockey fans. Edwards and Harvey have over 200,000 combined followers on the app, where they mostly post dancing videos or film an “outfit of the day.”

Edwards said it’s Harvey who comes up with the best ideas. Harvey, who took a page out of the Marie-Philip Poulin book of humble, disagrees.

“Your algorithm is just better,” Edwards argued with her friend. “Mine is all Billie Eilish and Michael Jackson edits.”

“She has great ideas,” Harvey contends. “The dances are our go-to videos. We just like to have fun together.”

In their senior year, Harvey and Edwards took a bit of a side quest by fostering two animals, first a cat and then a rabbit. That meant daily calls home to Harvey’s mom, Martha, with questions like: What do rabbits eat? And what are these pellets on the ground?

The answer, of course, was lettuce and “that would be poop.” (The cat and rabbit were both eventually adopted to their forever homes.)

“When they’re together, they’re quite the duo,” said David. “They’re just pure hearts.”

Through it all, Edwards and Harvey only continued to level up on the ice. Last season, Edwards led the NCAA in goals (35 in 41 games), was named a top-three finalist for the Patty Kazmaier Award and made an unprecedented swap from forward to defense on Team USA.

“It’s been so cool for me, watching Laila’s journey and what she’s done and the trailblazer she’s become and continues to be,” Harvey said. “It’s incredible to see how many people she’s touched along the way.”

This year, they both made the U.S. team that won gold at the Milan Olympics. Nobody had more points in the tournament than Harvey (9), who won Olympic MVP and set a record for scoring by an American defender at just 23 years old. Edwards, in her Olympic debut, scored eight points and had the primary assist on captain Hilary Knight’s clutch game-tying goal to force overtime against Canada in the championship game.

When they returned to Madison, Harvey and Edwards led the Badgers to a second consecutive NCAA championship. Harvey finished second in the nation with 1.94 points per game and had the second-most productive season by a defender ever with 64 points – behind only Hockey Hall of Fame defender Angela Ruggiero, who scored 83 points in 34 games in 2002-03.

When Harvey was officially awarded the 2026 Patty Kazmaier Award, she thanked her family, teammates and coaches, and made special mention of her “best friend Laila.”

“To my best friend Laila, thank you for everything,” she said in the speech. “It’s been quite the ride with you. I’ll miss your constant friendship and the daily connection we share both on and off ice.”

Harvey and Edwards have spent the last couple months since their college careers ended preparing for the next phase of their lives — and spending as much time together as possible.

With the exposure that comes from winning an Olympic gold medal with a record 5.3 million people watching in the U.S., there’s been a flurry of major opportunities for Edwards and Harvey. They appeared at the espnW summit, which was packed with stars like the WNBA’s Breanna Stewart. They filmed an episode of “Celebrity Family Feud” and went to the Coachella music festival in California, where Edwards’ favorite artist (Billie Eilish) made an appearance.

“We’ve been doing some really cool things outside of hockey with the downtime we’re finally getting,” Edwards said.

As seniors, however, they had to work out in their condo gym so the next year’s team of Badgers can start their own preparations.

They’d bring a speaker into the gym and blast music, including what Harvey called a “big booty mix” on YouTube, which earned rave reviews from other tenants in the building.

“They’re actually good,” Harvey swore. “One guy took his headphones out once and was like, ‘This is fire.’”

After graduating last month, though, both Harvey and Edwards returned home — to New Hampshire and Cleveland, respectively — for the summer. They will meet again at the PWHL Draft in Detroit and then return to their apartment in July to officially move out. Soon, the jerseys on the walls and the pictures on the fridge will need to come down.

But first, on Wednesday night, they’ll find out exactly where they will land.

“All the experiences we’ve had on both the national team, Olympic team and then University of Wisconsin, to be able to do it alongside Laila has just been so special,” Harvey said. “This chapter might be closing, but we’re excited to write whatever’s next.”

[schr30der]

we are all tormented by expansion but laila edwards is our collective light at the end of the tunnel

[schr30der]

laiiilla 🙏🏼

[pharmersonly]

supreme laila edwards glaze happening in the kyle cushman final 2026 draft ranking btw

[pharmersonly]

like heeeeeee gets it. maybe the only one who gets it. (besides me, and my wonderfully smart laila loving mutuals on here, of course.)

[pwhl-mybeloved]

what is it about women's hockey that gets us all so emotional. im a convert from men's hockey and i never once got this attached to players or invested in my NHL team. and now im like if my emotional support d pair gets broken up by expansion everyone will feel it for 1000 years

I can’t speak for you but I have big feelings about pretty much everything

[eerilyquietglacier]

the draft has me feeling some type of way as a Charge fan

[sailermoon]

this is how new yorkers @ mamdani

[sailermoon]

[mylordshesacactus]

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

[alex51324]

A good time to remember this story.

(And if you want to know more about how community and altruism are humanity’s characteristic response to disaster, read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell.)

[nicolethered]

Pedro Pascal talks his toxic GPS relationship (2026)

[qseomik]

Big Aries Energy

[mathsturbation]

sometimes i fantasise about people shutting the fuck up

[hudconera]

happy pride month to this iconic scene

[handsywoman]

strangers to colleagues to friends to soulmates <3

[sanguinaryrot]

“go to hell” is basic. “i hope your favorite team recruits britta curl-salemme” is smart. it’s possible. it’s terrifying.

[noah-wyles]

all i want for 2026 is that gigantic rancid AI bubble to finally burst in such a catastrophic way that the consequences will be so good and i'll never have to see another AI generated image ever again

[fluoritegalaxy]

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

[grantmentis]

PWHL be like our league front office of ten people who are extremely enmeshed in all the teams since its all one ownership Is going to execute the most complicated expansion process of all time and there will be no tampering (five minutes into the process) every team is at Daryl watts house

[nicolegoslingdefender]

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thepwhloffical: the countdown to the draft is on 👀

Get to know badgershockey's Laila Edwards, one of the top prospects in this year's draft class!