Olympic women’s goalie Shannon Szabados practices with Edmonton Oilers

The Edmonton Oilers were in a quandary Wednesday. They had traded backup goalie Ilya Bryzgalov to Minnesota and newly acquired goalie Viktor Fasth had yet to arrive from the Ducks. That left them with just one goalie, Ben Scrivens, for practice. Unless they wanted to run Scrivens ragged, what to do?

Place a call to Shannon Szabados, the goalie for Canada’s women’s hockey team, which just won a gold medal at the Sochi Games.

“She’s pretty good,” Oilers right winger Jordan Eberle told Chris Purdy of the Canadian Press. “Once you figure that out, you try and score and put in as many as you can.

“It’s great that she could step in and help us out.”

No woman has ever played in an NHL regular-season game. Manon Rheaume played in an exhibition game with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 1992.

“If I was the last resort, then maybe,” Szabados said. “As a hockey player, you just want to play the highest level possible, and playing in Sochi, winning a gold medal, was fun. And taking part in an NHL practice was pretty cool.”

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