Rookie Jillian Dempsey is realizing a childhood dream by suiting up for the Crimson. A five-year varsity star at the Rivers School in Weston, Mass., Dempsey has wanted to attend Harvard since sixth grade.

Just over midway through the first period in the Harvard women’s hockey team’s exhibition game against McGill on Saturday, Jillian Dempsey readied herself for a faceoff in the Martlets’ zone.

The puck dropped, and Dempsey pounced. The freshman zipped a pass behind her to co-captain Kathryn Farni, who found junior forward Kate Buesser streaking towards the net. Buesser went top shelf for the goal, and just like that, Dempsey had her first assist in a Crimson uniform.

There will be more assists for Dempsey, and goals too. But for the Winthrop, Mass. native, that one point in an easy 4-1 Harvard win represents the realization of a dream that’s been a long time coming.

“It was just surreal to hear ‘Dempsey’ on the loudspeaker,” she says. “Just the whole experience—putting on the jersey in the locker room...all the pregame rituals that the Harvard team does. Being out there on the ice was amazing.”

In a sense, the beginning of Dempsey’s Crimson career is an end—an end to a seven-year-long quest to play for Harvard. Since she saw the Crimson women take the ice for the first time as a sixth grader, Dempsey knew she wanted to play college hockey in Cambridge. From that point on, there was no debate about where she would end up—despite her high school coach’s attempt to initiate one—only the question of how she would get there.

“When she came in as an eighth grader,” says Kristen Harder, Dempsey’s coach at the Rivers School in Weston, Mass., “a lot of decisions she made in terms of what courses she was going to take, how hard she was going to work for her grades, all of those decisions were driven by a decision to go to Harvard. I couldn’t even get her to visit another campus.”

But while Harvard was always the final destination as she mapped out her future hockey plans, Dempsey certainly did not take a well-traveled path in getting there.

For a young skater from Massachusetts striving to play for a perennial national contender like the Crimson, one of the myriad New England prep schools with established girls’ hockey programs might have provided an ideal fit. But a boys’ coach from Rivers who was scouting Dempsey’s brother informed her that the school was starting a girls’ varsity team.

While Dempsey anticipated the challenges of playing for a brand new program, she was attracted to Rivers’ strong academic environment and felt comfortable at the school after interviewing.

“It was a great school, and it looked like something I would really like to attend,” Dempsey says. “I was going pretty much because of the school. I knew the hockey team was brand new.”

In Dempsey’s first season, when she was an eighth grader on the varsity team, the Rivers squad struggled mightily, consistently falling in blowouts to more experienced teams.

“That first year, we weren’t terribly competitive because all of our best players were eighth and ninth graders,” Harder says.

But even in that trying season, signs of the determination and intensity that would define Dempsey’s playing style and inspire the rest of her teammates began to emerge.

“One game we had held a tough opponent to only seven goals with a minute left to go,” Harder recalls. “Jill got a breakaway and scored...Our celebration was as if we had tied it up to put it into overtime.”

Over the next few years, Rivers began to win games, and Dempsey began to establish herself as the team’s leader and one of the nation’s top prep school prospects.