The day the music stops

To double-click on the Maysa Walters > 2023 > Photos folder is to willing subject yourself to heartbreak, to see what was and no longer is.

The collection of photos starts on Aug. 1, inside Washington-Grizzly Stadium, with the running of the team's preseason fitness test. It comes to an end on Sept. 14, Montana against Miami (Ohio) at South Campus Stadium, the day her season came to an abrupt and unexpected close.

That's when the heartbreak settles in, when there are no more photos to click through. No photos of Walters hoisting the Big Sky Conference championship trophy, no photos of her celebrating another goal she set up with her exquisite passing. Nothing.

The first photos, from the fitness test on the first day of August, are quintessential Walters. The rest of the team has tapped out, some after meeting the minimum requirement of 30 on the Beep Test, others after going a bit further.

In the end, one player stands alone: Walters, everyone else lining the turf as she keeps going, keeps digging deeper, keeps defeating the test. 46, 47, 48, 49, 50. They cheer her on in reverential support. OMG, she's a machine, the freshmen had to be thinking. The rest? They knew. That's just Maysa.

Her mom ran marathons when Walters was growing up. Her dad? Ultramarathons, because why stop at 26.2 miles when Montana is both your play- and training ground? "This is who we are. This is who you got (as parents). Here we go," says her mom.

"My family was super active. We were always outside, always doing something," Walters said this week. "I remember hiking the Beaten Path when I was 5 or 6." Oh, just the Beaten Path? Nearly 30 miles of trail in the Beartooth-Absoraka Wilderness, topping out at 10,000 feet of elevation?

"I gravitated toward what my family liked, and I liked it too."

You keep clicking through the images. Action photos now. There is Walters, in upper-body combat with an opponent, fighting for the ball at their feet. Walters in full stride, chasing down a free ball. Walters, one leg planted in front, one leg cocked behind, ready to play a ball forward.

The one thing missing from the entire collection of game photos? A smile. There was a get-out-of-my-way orneriness to her play, an athletic aggression that was as delightful to watch as someone whose on-field joy can't be contained. Both work.

Even the photos taken after goals had been scored, ones that capture Walters in a group celebration, reveal an urgency on her face, not satisfaction. That was good, let's get more, it said to her teammates. We're not done, not yet.

It was what her mom, Terri, saw when she was coaching one of Maysa's first soccer teams, age four, maybe five. There was Maysa and there was this boy on the other team, and they went at it, at each other, young alphas.

"By the time they were done, the boy was pulling himself up off the ground, he was sweaty, he had grass all over him," she recalls. "It was fun watching her compete, even at that age."

She acquired her parents' verve for individual pursuits outdoors, trail running, the snowy slopes, anything that provided that rush of adrenaline, that feeling that you're not just living but alive. They passed down their competitiveness as well, something that needed an outlet in a sport of some kind.

"Soccer was so natural for her," says her mom. "From Day 1. I think the first soccer thing we put her in, she was four, but we got her a ball before that. You could just see there was something special there. That was her thing, so we just ran with it."

Cross country took hold. So did basketball. Until only soccer was left. "Once I realized I liked it more and was better at it, I chose soccer over basketball. Plus, I'm only 5-5, so I probably wouldn't have made it that far in basketball."

She said that on Thursday, the day she arrived at the Adams Center on crutches, exactly one week removed from surgery to repair the ACL and meniscus in her left leg, the result of a dangerous play by a Miami midfielder who came in low and hard and from behind Walters. Let's go ahead and call it dirty.

This isn't a story about photos in a folder. It's about loss, anger. It's about a family's life turned upside down, everything they had set up as expectations, everything they had planned for, now a pile of broken dreams at their feet. A What's next? question just lingering in the air, going unanswered.

This was a fifth-year senior, who had sacrificed so much to get to the final months of her final collegiate season, including moving to Denver for her final three years of high school and living with a host family to gain better and easier access to that city's high-level clubs.

Who played three years at New Mexico before transferring back to her home state, to the Grizzlies. This was going to be storybook. Then one day you turn the page and the rest of them have been torn out. There is no story. There is nothing left. It's just The End, just like that.

"We were almost there," says Terri, who along with her husband purchased an RV in July to follow their daughter around for this last dance. "Right now, we're all going through this grief cycle. It was a dirty tackle, so there is a lot of anger there."

Terri has thrived as a runner on training plans, each day on the calendar something to accomplish, something to check off. If it's an off day, you fill in the blank. You're never OFF off. That's torture.

"That she can't be active, that's even worse than not being able to play soccer," she says. "This is so much bigger than anything myself or my husband or Maysa has had to contend with before. What are her outlets? It's always been physical activity."

When she crutched herself into the Adams Center on Thursday, her left leg braced up, immobilized, it wasn't Maysa Walters coming through the door, not as you've known her, the one from all those photos. This was someone else. That's what she's coping with, not being the person she created.

That's the problem with going all in on something with so much passion, so much intent. It becomes part of your identity. When that's done, or even worse, taken away unexpectedly, you're left as a shell of yourself. What fills the empty space? Typically the worst of your emotions: anger, despair, the rest.

She's a stoic one. Really stoic. Her mom, at least prior to her daughter's injury in mid-September, remembers Maysa crying one time, at the loss of a pet. "Watching her try to contend with all the emotions of this, it's tough," Terri says.

Walters talked for 20 minutes on Thursday, those emotions bubbling up time and again, breaking the surface here and there. She trusts you, trusts you enough to share the challenges of going from elite athlete to watching from the sideline, from teammate to outsider.

How she's tried to trick her mind, how she's attempted to convince herself that she's played hundreds and hundreds of games in her career, and that the nine she's missed since her injury are only a tiny fraction of that. So, look on the bright side.

But she can't convince herself. It's a tough sell when those matches are what would have been the final games of your collegiate career, eight of them Big Sky matches, played by the team that she helped bring back from the disappointment of last season.

Those hundreds and hundreds of games? They are not created equally. These would have meant the most, in her fifth year, on this team, the one making history.

"The only thing I tell myself is, how many games did I play? I've been hit thousands of times. Why now? It was one-in-a-million. I guess there is a reason for everything," she says, clearly not having any idea what that reason could possibly be. "Sucks," she adds, then takes a moment to compose herself.

An ACL is a devilish injury. Had you watched the team do its pregame warmups at South Campus Stadium post-Miami, you would have seen Walters joining in, kicking, smiling. It's almost enough to convince yourself that you're okay. Then the team takes the field and you return to the bench.

She had to wait weeks for her surgery to take place, which left her weeks to kick the ball around, go for hikes, go for runs. All the while knowing the clock on recovery does not start until the final stitch is in place after the surgery. She would have preferred injury > MRI > surgery in a three-day span.

Get it over with so we can move on. But it doesn't work like that.

"It prolongs the reality of what is reality," she says. "You kind of know but not really. I got to do what I wanted to do with the exception of soccer but …" Pause as she gathers herself. "The hardest acceptance was 3-4 days after." Pause. "It is what it is." Pause. Break.

That was loss of self. The loss of the sense of being a teammate is just as difficult, because everyone means well. They wanted her to feel part of what they were doing and she wanted to maintain that connection as well, but it's just not the same. It can't be. Too many dynamics had changed.

There were two banner moments at South Campus Stadium this season. One was the home match against Ohio State that drew a crowd of nearly 2,000 fans, whom Walters energized by converting a penalty kick in the ninth minute to give Montana a 1-0 lead.

The other was last week, when the Grizzlies hosted and defeated Sacramento State 2-0 to win the Big Sky Conference championship. It was the same afternoon as Walters' surgery.

One viewpoint: How terrible that she had to miss it after all she had invested into the team. Her viewpoint: It was for the best. How does a star player feel unworthy of celebrating a team's success? When she wasn't on the field for any of those league matches.

Everyone knows the time and effort she put in over the spring semester, over the summer at captains' practices, to get Montana on the path that has led to one of the best regular seasons in Big Sky history.

Everyone knows what she did through the season's first nine matches to put the Grizzlies on the trajectory they are still enjoying.

But she knows where she has been since Sept. 14, and that's not on the field. She has the classic earn-reward mindset. It's how she became the player she is. If she didn't put in the work to earn it, she doesn't feel worthy of collecting the reward.

"I was kind of glad to have surgery the day they won." Note the use of the word "they," not "we." The feeling of separation is real. It's sad but totally understandable. "It was easier to not be there," she says.

"Everyone has been great to support me, but at the end of the day, I know I didn't play in any of these games, so I didn't really contribute to the wins. I'm super competitive and hard on myself. I don't think I necessarily earned the trophy."

Coach Chris Citowicki wanted to get a photo of the team with Walters and the trophy. She passed. Yeah, this stuff is real. And it's hard. "She would have loved to have been a part of the championship, but it's painful," says Terri. "From so many angles, it's been too much."

The family tries to embrace the perspective that it could be worse, that she could be dealing with something that is more serious, more life-threatening, but that's short-lived, a chimera. It's theory while this is reality. This is in your face and right up in your business.

"At least we got the surgery over with," says Terri. "God, that was awful watching her in that much pain. My gosh, I had no idea. The pain was incredible.

"The day after surgery, we would go out for walks and she'd crutch a block or two. Before I left, she was up to six blocks. She sent me a Snapchat the other night. She was doing pushups. She's doing what she can do."

She'll attack the rehab, of that you can be certain, never missing an appointment or therapy session, probably sneaking in an extra rep or two when no one's watching, trying to bend time in her favor.

What's next? You ask Walters about playing professionally, about continuing her career so Miami wasn't the end of the line. She begins to answer, then comes up short. It's too much at this point to think about, something that is over the mountain she can't see past at the moment. She pauses again.

"She'll be okay. She's strong," says her mom, who interviewed on Friday morning after feeding the family's three turkeys, Thomas, Ebb and Flow. Maysa named the two girls. How fitting. "Our little thing these days is, just keep swimming."

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