Just outside of Minneapolis, in the small town of Wayzata, Minn., a midnight freeze followed an unseasonably warm winter day. In the driveway of Edmund and Harriett Chute, a natural ice rink formed. Their daughters, Katharine and Margaret, moved nets down to the ice and began playing hockey.

“You read about Gretzky and how he just loved hockey,” says The Blake School coach Brano Stankovsky. “The same goes with Katharine and Margaret.”

After playing three years side by side at Blake, Katharine and Margaret Chute—now a junior and freshman at Harvard, respectively—are reunited, skating for the Crimson in the cozy confines of Bright Hockey Center.

Each sister brings something different to the ice, and both will prove invaluable for a Harvard squad with a small roster—the Crimson will manage only three offensive lines this year.

“Katharine does everything at hyper-speed,” Stankovsky says. “She tries to be excellent at what she does...She’s very gentle as a person everywhere else except on the ice—she’s a fire plug.”

“Margaret has a more cerebral quality to her,” he adds. “She thinks things through.”

Despite disparate approaches to the game, the Chutes complement each other well.

“They learned where each other would be, so they could make some really exciting plays,” their father Edmund Chute says of his daughters’ high school days. “I think the most interesting part of that was when they were on penalty kill. Sometimes there’d be just the two of them, and I think the coach told me once that when they were a woman down, they often scored more often.”

“We’ve watched each other play for years, so it’s really nice to be on the ice and know where Margaret’s going to be,” Katharine adds.

So far, Harvard coach Katey Stone has Katharine and Margaret matched up on the same forward line, flanking senior Anna McDonald. How the sisters’ dynamic translates onto the ice for the Crimson remains to be seen, but Stone is optimistic that the pairing will bring good results.

“I know that they’re both happy to be going to school together,” Stone says, “and how that shakes out as far as what it looks like for our team, it’s way too early. Hopefully it’s going to be a real positive for our team.”

“I think that’s going to be a really exciting line that I really want to see,” Edmund says, having followed McDonald, also from the Minneapolis area, since before Harvard. “I think that combination is really exciting.”

But playing on the same line is no new feeling for the Chute sisters. During Katharine’s senior year at Blake—Margaret’s sophomore year—they played together, leading their team to a state finals victory. Margaret repeated the feat her senior year, when she captained the team, and Katharine won her first state title when she was in eighth grade playing for the Blake varsity squad.

“That much poise as an eighth grader is something you don’t find,” Stankovsky says.

For their part, the Chutes are just happy to be together again.