TORONTO - Midway through the second period of an elite women's hockey game last Saturday, two defensemen converged at their blue line to haul Natalie Spooner to the ice, earning a tripping penalty. When Spooner was deployed on the ensuing power play, she snuck into a vacant gap in the slot, took a pass, and wired a one-timer off the goaltender's arm.

The rebound fell to the side of the crease, where Spooner's teammate Carolyne Prevost poked the puck into the net.

The sequence and its end result were happily familiar to Spooner, an influential power forward on Canadian teams that medaled at the past seven world championships and at the 2014 and 2018 Olympics. More familiar, certainly, than the position in which she'd found herself at another rink a couple of nights earlier: backflipping onto the shoulder of a champion ice dancer, where she stretched her arms aloft as the two of them glided to the chorus of a country song.

Such is life this autumn for a 28-year-old star with a resume to envy and time to fill. As the 2019-20 professional hockey season gets set to begin, many of the women's game's brightest talents are embarking instead on their own barnstorming tour, staging a series of showcase events across the U.S. and Canada to amplify their call for the creation of a league that can pay all of them a living wage.

Separately and simultaneously, two of those women - Spooner and American forward Amanda Kessel - signed up for a crash course in figure skating that plays out live on Thursday nights on Canadian national TV. They are among the protagonists of this season's "Battle of the Blades," the CBC show that pits seven pairs of prominent hockey players and figure skaters against one another in competition.

"When you play hockey, it doesn't really matter what you look like if you get the job done - you get from point A to B and score," Spooner said in an interview Saturday, two days after her first performance with veteran Canadian Olympic ice dancer Andrew Poje.

"In 'Battle of the Blades,' it's keeping your shoulders down, and smiling, and looking pretty," she said. "It's definitely way different. But I'm having a blast with it, and just trying to take it all in and learn lots."

Poje was one of thousands of fans who passed through the stands of a suburban Toronto arena over the weekend to watch the first slate of games of the Dream Gap Tour. The nascent Professional Women's Hockey Players Association so named the series of events to highlight the chasm between what boys and girls who play hockey can aspire to accomplish in the game - mainly, getting paid enough money in a pro league to make hockey their full-time job.

The National Women's Hockey League, whose five teams will operate with a salary cap of $150,000 this season, begins play Oct. 5 as the only remaining women's pro league. The Canadian Women's Hockey League ceased operations last spring and more than 150 players who compose the PWHPA have chosen to band together in search of a permanent, sustainable solution. The magnitude of the moment is unmistakable. No one is certain what the future holds.

In the meantime, as the Dream Gap Tour prepares to visit two American cities - Hudson, New Hampshire, an hour north of Boston, on Oct. 5-6, and Chicago on Oct. 19-20 - several of the movement's most recognizable names have stocked their calendars with other interesting commitments.

Kendall Coyne Schofield, the American winger whose showing in the fastest skater event commanded the spotlight at last season's NHL All-Star weekend, joined the San Jose Sharks' TV broadcast as a part-time color analyst. Her teammate Brianna Decker is an assistant coach with the U.S. women's under-18 team. U.S. defenseman Kacey Bellamy is taking a business class in which she's researching the leadership legacy of tennis icon and women's equality advocate Billie Jean King. U.S. forward Hilary Knight recently walked the runway at a New York Fashion Week gala whose proceeds went toward a children's sport nonprofit. The PWHPA has organized regional training hubs so that its players can practice regularly throughout the season.

Through weeks of training with their "Battle of the Blades" partners, Spooner and Kessel - who is paired with 2018 Olympic pairs bronze medalist Eric Radford - are coming to understand the divergence between what is required to excel at hockey and at figure skating. Newcomers to the latter sport have to learn to stay upright on a toe pick; they feel the edges of their blades more acutely than do hockey players. At the Dream Gap Tour's Toronto stop, Canadian center Marie-Philip Poulin explained why it wasn't too hard for her to keep pace in her first competitive game in months: she didn't have to rapidly transition back from "white skates."

"It's picking up a brand new sport and doing it at the highest level," said Tessa Bonhomme, the retired Canadian defenseman who won "Battle of the Blades" eight years ago with 2002 Olympic pairs gold medalist David Pelletier.

"You come into this sport where you think already know how to skate - and quite frankly, I usually got pretty good reviews on my skating reports. You get out on these figure skates and you're watching Dave or any of the other competitors go through their warmup, and meanwhile you're dripping sweat, just trying to figure out, 'Left goes first or right goes first?'"

For Bonhomme, the key to victory involved refusing to shy away from tricks that might reasonably induce fear, such as the handstand that segued into a face-first swing in which her head came within inches of the ice. She thinks Spooner - her former teammate on the Canadian national team and the CWHL's Toronto Furies - possesses that kind of nerve and drive, as well as a personality that will endear her to the audience.

"I think what's going to work in her favor is that she is fearless, and she isn't embarrassed to laugh at herself," Bonhomme said in an interview the week before Spooner's "Battle of the Blades" debut. "I've seen her dance moves in the locker room and off the ice. It'll be interesting to see if that can translate with skates up."

The early returns suggest that Spooner should be just fine. As she and Poje skated to Dean Brody's "Canadian Girls" in Hamilton, Ontario, last Thursday, she pointed and grinned at host Ron MacLean when one lyric mentioned the renowned sportscaster's name. Later, she dropped to a knee and spun 360 degrees before Poje flipped her backward in the routine's conclusive flourish. The show's judges awarded them three scores of 9.3.

Spooner said she hopes her "Battle of the Blades" experience will make her a stronger hockey skater, perhaps by elongating her stride. She's also competing to drum up awareness and funds for Fast and Female, a small charity that works with athlete role models to encourage girls to play sports.

"A lot of girls drop out of sports when they're around 13, 14, hitting puberty, and a lot of it has to do with body image," Spooner said. She notes that at 5-foot-10, she's much bigger than the typical female figure skater.

It's easy to discern how Fast and Female's animating purpose mirrors that of the PWHPA. Even if Spooner and Kessel's cohort of stars never gets the chance to play in the sustainable league that it envisions, the generation that succeeds that cohort might.

That possibility was front of mind all weekend in Toronto, where Spooner built on her power-play assist from Saturday by scoring on a nifty backhand move the following morning. At the end of that game, a Dream Gap Tour official handed her a Budweiser-sponsored goal light, which flashed red as she circled center ice and the crowd cheered.

"The biggest thing is for little girls to still watch women play hockey (this season)," Spooner said. "There is a future for women's hockey that we're fighting for - for them."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

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