GRAND PRAIRIE, Alta. -- Northern Ontario came up a shot short in their quest to bring a Scotties Tournament of Hearts championship back to Thunder Bay.
Skip Krista McCarville could only watch as Alberta’s Chelsea Carey made an open draw to the four-foot Sunday night to score one with hammer in the 10th to give Alberta a 7-6 win and deliver the Calgary native her first national women’s curling championship.
McCarville, 33, attempted a hit and roll to make it a more difficult final draw on ice that had been giving shooters trouble all week. But her final stone rolled too far.
"We were hoping on my final stone to hit and roll, but mine over-curled so she had the exact same draw," said McCarville, reached by phone early Monday morning.
McCarville said despite despite the sting of the loss, she's not looking at her fifth run at a Scotties title as a disappointment.
"Obviously we had a really good week getting to the final," she said.
"While it's a negative (to lose), overall it's a positive."
The difference between the two teams was negligible for most of the night.
"It was just a shot here and a there we'd like to take back," McCarville said. "It came down for them to have the hammer in the 10th end."
Carey, whose team finished the week 9-2, wasn’t about to make a mistake with the trophy on the line.
The Alberta skip described her last shot as terrifying, even though she'd thrown a similar path on her first shot of the final end.
“It was nice to throw it on my first stone,” she told TSN moments after clinching the win.
“It was just kind of the same weight so I just made sure to take my time and take a deep breath. I just gave it the same weight and the girls judged it perfectly and luckily I made it.”
McCarville, third Kendra Lilly, second Ashley Sippala and lead Sarah Potts, who curl out of the Fort William Curling Club, settled for silver.
It was the first Scotties final for McCarville and her teammates. She and Sippala won bronze in 2010, Thunder Bay's most recent appearance at nationals.
Much like their round-robin clash, the match went back-and-forth, Carey jumping out in front 3-1 in the fourth end. But she gave the deuce right back to McCarville in the fifth and the two sides hit the break tied 3-3.
Carey drew to the button to retake the lead in the sixth, but was deep on her draw on her final stone in the seventh, giving McCarville a shot at a draw for two and her first lead of the night. The Thunder Bay skip made the shot and took a 5-4 lead into the eighth.
Carey, whose father Dan was a member of the 1992 Brier-winning team, answered immediately, scoring a pair to move in front 6-5.
"Really in eight is where we wanted to force them to one. When she took two, the roles got reversed," McCarville said.
She then held McCarville to a single in the ninth, the Northern Ontario captain's attempted difficult draw to the button for two falling short in traffic.
The two skips were nearly identical in their shooting, McCarville curling at an 86 per cent clip to Carey's 88.
McCarville said the team plans to be back in 2017, though acknowledged Sudbury's Tracy Fleury, the inaugural Northern Ontario champion in 2015, might have a word or two to say about her plan.
Carey advances to next month’s world championships and will be back at next year’s Scotties Tournament of Hearts in St. Catharines, Ont. as Team Canada.
