How friends and family kept Zoe Boyd on track through tragedy

Zoe Boyd knows she's part of history every time she takes the ice for Ottawa during the inaugural PWHL season. But there's a more personal reason she's excited to play professional hockey: This will be the first time since high school her mom will be able to watch.

"She was just the most proud, loud, loving mom in the stands," Boyd says, remembering when they would both watch her older brother play minor hockey.

There was once a time when Boyd's mom, Tammy Thomson, was the ultimate hockey mom, and missing so much of her daughter's career - one that includes representing Canada at the world under-18s and playing NCAA Division I hockey - would have been unfathomable.

"She was one energetic hockey mom. She absolutely loved going to the games and the practices, tying up skates, and being a team manager. She was very vocal and supportive," Boyd's dad, Jim, says.

"My mom was kind of a nut in the stands yelling, the whole game," Boyd says. "She loved to film things so she would have her camcorder out and then sometimes we would watch the game at home."

When Boyd was about three years old, Thomson enrolled her in hockey summer camp alongside her older brother, and Boyd admits that at first she wasn't too interested in learning the finer details of the game.

"I would just do snow angels on the ice while they all did the drills," she says.

But it wasn't long before her innate desire to keep up with the boys in her neighborhood changed that.

"From the moment I could start dressing myself and expressing myself, I was very much a tomboy," she says. "Once I got skating under my belt, you just want to be competitive and play with the guys and be rough, and it just slowly developed.

"In the winters, we would skate with my cousins on the ponds and play pickup hockey. So I would say the love of hockey probably started more so coming to me out on the pond. I thought I was going to be playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs. My dad told me about Manon Rheaume when I was little and I thought, 'Well, she did it. I'm going to do it, too.'"

Her daughter's growing interest in hockey wasn't something Thomson would ever be able to fully comprehend and support. When Boyd was five years old, Thomson was on her way home from work when her small car was hit by a pickup truck. First responders cut open her car to extricate her from the wreckage, and as a result of the collision she fell into a coma.

"It was an awful thing to go through as a partner or spouse, and an awful thing to go through for her children, and an awful thing to go through for Tammy herself," Jim says.

After four months, Thomson regained consciousness but had a profound traumatic brain injury and full paralysis. While she relearned how to speak and read - and regained her sense of humor - she had lost her memory. Thomson doesn't recall getting married or becoming a mother. She requires indefinite support at a long-term care facility.

"It's really hard to be a young person and lose somebody who should have such a large impact on your life because you almost feel like you're missing a part of yourself," Boyd says. "I certainly went through a period of time where I felt like I didn't know who I was, or wasn't going to, because I didn't know who my mom was."

Boyd wasn't left to deal with the trauma alone; she had a kindred spirit to help her through. Her childhood best friend, Kristin Della Rovere, lived just a few houses away in their hometown of Caledon East, Ontario, northwest of Toronto. The girls had met a few years prior when Thomson arrived at the Della Rovere household, Boyd in tow, to pick up her older son from a playdate.

"Tammy was a little bit upset because they had finished the day in kindergarten. And Zoe's teacher said, 'Zoe loves to play with boys, she wants to run around, she should try to find some girls that are friends because it might be hard for her when she goes to public school,'" Della Rovere's mom, Elizabeth Dimovski, says.

As Thomson stood in the doorway explaining her concerns to Dimovski, Boyd stood behind her, arms wrapped around her mom's leg. "She had this cute little baseball cap on backwards and boys' clothes. And I'm talking to Tammy at the door and Kristin comes and stands at the door and she's got the same outfit. Like, mirror images of each other. Tammy almost cried. She said, 'Oh my God, you have one of those too?' There was an instant love."

Their simpatico only grew after Thomson's injury. "When I was with (Della Rovere) I don't ever think I thought, 'Oh, my mom's not here.' It was always just like - we're doing something. We're playing pond hockey, we're playing road hockey. It was - I guess an escape is a good way to put it," Boyd says.

Della Rovere's entire family leaned in to support Boyd. Dimovski still remembers the day a young Boyd approached her with a burning question: "What's a godmother?"

"Well, when your parents are busy and can't take care of you, the godmother takes care of you," Dimovski told her.

"Can you be my godmother?" asked Boyd.

After conferring with Boyd's dad, Dimovski accepted.

"I think spending all that time at Kristin's house with her mom and her dad and her siblings was super healing for me," Boyd says. "They did a really good job of protecting me and shielding me from some obvious hard things. It's safe to say her mom was kind of like a second mom to me. Just having them was huge for being able to kind of persevere."

That didn't mean the road was easy for Boyd. "The older I got, the more that I understood what I was missing out on by not having my mom with me or knowing who she was, and the harder it became. My teens were really tough in that sense. I really felt a longing for what could have been. I really felt like I was missing out on what all my friends had," she says.

"Kristin and her mom Elizabeth did such an amazing job at talking about my mom and telling me about her. Even if we would pass a coffee shop and Liz remembered that my mom used to like that coffee shop, small things like that just meant the world to me."

Boyd and Della Rovere played together through the 2014-15 season in Bantam AA with the North Halton Twisters. After that they remained close friends despite attending separate universities - Della Rovere at Harvard and Boyd two hours away at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

"When we were kids we always used to say, 'We're going to move in together, we're going to go to the same college,' but you kind of get on your own path," Della Rovere says. "We've always been close and stayed in contact, but you definitely don't see each other as much."

But the PWHL draft put their lives on a similar course once again.

Boyd was selected 53rd overall by Ottawa; Della Rovere joined her three picks later. "We missed Kristin's draft because we were celebrating Zoe's draft," Dimovski says. "The family chat was all about Zoe."

"I wasn't even watching the stream anymore because we were all congratulating Zoe," Della Rovere says. "My agent called me and was like, 'You just got drafted!'"

"For them to be drafted on the same team was magical, honestly," Dimovski says.

"We knew right away we would be roommates," says Boyd.

The 23-year-olds found an apartment together in Ottawa and their dads road-tripped from Caledon East to help build their furniture. It was a full-circle moment, and for Boyd the beginning of a new era of her hockey career - one where she's a bit more in touch with her own identity.

Thomson has rarely been able to watch Boyd's career unfold. Boyd's college games weren't televised and were too far for her mom to travel. But this season with the PWHL is different. When Ottawa meets Toronto on Saturday, Thomson will be within an hour's drive of the arena, close enough to attend.

"When I saw the schedule I texted my dad right away, and I was almost in tears. I was like, 'You have to bring mom to our game against Toronto,' and he said, 'Absolutely, I will.'"

It will be a lot of work to transport Thomson from the long-term care facility in Brampton to the arena, and Boyd's not sure how much of the game her mom will be able to follow. But it's her mere presence in Boyd's life that's important.

"I realized that I'm never going to get to know my mom as the person who she was pre-accident. And that shouldn't have to determine who I am. I should be able to determine who I am by myself," Boyd says. That doesn't mean she's leaving her mom out of the equation. "She can be a part of that." That's why having her loud, proud mom in the stands once again will mean so much. "It's going to be really special for me to have her there."

Jolene Latimer is a feature writer at theScore.