Nicole Dennion sounded almost sheepish as she admitted she had watched the highlight only a few days earlier.

Sheepish but still proud.

The highlight in question was one of her favorites from the 2013 season, a campaign in which Dennion, then only a sophomore at Elon University, was recognized as the Southern Conference player of the year. She totaled 15 goals and six assists in 22 games and led the Phoenix to within a win of what would have been just the program's second appearance in the NCAA tournament. So there were more than a few memorable moments, but one from a regular-season game at Davidson stuck with her as perhaps the best of the bunch.

The echo of the referee's whistle to begin the game barely silenced, she got the ball near midfield, raced down the sideline and scored. It took all of 19 seconds. There was no assist. It was a goal scorer doing what goal scorers do. Dennion doing what she had always done, from the time the adults running the show had to bench her in a peewee game because she had scored too many times.

"Soccer is literally my life," Dennion said. "I think about soccer every day of my life."

It might sound frivolous to suggest a game is what she lives for. Yet she earned the right to choose those words.

"We told her early on she's got an opportunity to write an incredible story here," Elon coach Chris Neal said. "She basically is writing it every day that she wakes up."

Elon teammates and opponents alike have been rallying behind Dennion's courageous struggle, signing a jersey with her nickname "Colie" and adding words of encouragement. Courtesy of Elon University

A lot has changed since that encounter with Davidson almost exactly a year ago. For one thing, Elon is no longer in the Southern Conference, instead struggling through its first season in the Colonial Athletic Association, one of the best mid-major soccer leagues in the country. But that isn't why Dennion won't repeat as a conference player of the year. While her teammates practice and play in Elon, North Carolina, a small town between Greensboro and the triangle formed by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, she is home in New Jersey watching games, or old highlights, on her computer.

Dennion was diagnosed in January with Ewing's sarcoma, a form of bone cancer that most often occurs in children and young adults. Home ever since for treatment that has included surgery to remove the tumor and round after round of chemotherapy, she counts down the days until life, so to speak, resumes.

She keeps the tally on a whiteboard in her room, each day changing the last digit.

It isn't a count of the days until her next doctor's appointment. It isn't the days since an August scan showed no signs of cancer. It isn't the days until graduation, for which she remains on track to walk with her class after juggling chemotherapy, online classes and even an internship with a cancer therapist.

It is the days until the start of soccer preseason next summer.

She plans on being there. Anyone who wants to tell her otherwise, wants to counsel her to begin some other chapter in her life, might as well save the air.

"I'm a coach, she's the conference player of the year, so I'd be an idiot not to want her back on the field," Neal said. "There's no doubt in my mind that she will see the field again. She's just got an incredible internal passion and fire to play the game.

"Lord help the team she gets reintroduced to."

It didn't take long for Neal to see the talent Dennion had to play the game when he recruited her (he was aided perhaps by a back injury that prevented her from putting her best foot forward during the key recruiting showcases during her junior year of high school and placed her in the mid-major sphere). The rest came with a learning curve. She was diagnosed with mono early in the fall of her freshman year and missed about a month of practice. The coach struggled to get more than one-word responses to questions when she returned. It wasn't until after that season that the real Dennion emerged.

"She's fiery, very opinionated and not scared to let people know what she thinks," Neal said. "She's got a goal scorer's mentality on and off the field, you know what I mean? Goal scorers are never typically quiet, reserved people on the inside. She was very, very confident, not scared of conflict, so to speak, and very, very competitive. Hyper-competitive internally. I don't need to say anything to her to get her motivated to play a soccer game."

Yet the best way she could explain her success that season was to talk about her earliest memories on the soccer field, those days when she scored so often she had to sit down to give everyone else a chance.