It's amazing what a little button can do. When you're younger, you're always slipping, and if you could make it across the ice sheet and back, you'd get this little button which you fasten to your laces. So I remember being like, "OK, I really want all the buttons."

It's this bulldozer effect on the ice. I noticed that if I'm 185 pounds or more [as I was for the Olympics], I get this crazy power-forward mentality and no one can stop me. I definitely still felt feminine at 185. I just jumped right in and took hold of being proud and happy with being a female athlete.

I caught someone's sunglasses on a roller coaster once. It was somewhere in Ohio -- Cedar Point or something like that -- one of those thrill rides. A few cars up, someone's sunglasses had fallen off, and we were on one of those corkscrew parts, and I saw sunglasses and just instinctively grabbed them right out of the air. I was like, "Oh, my reaction time is really good. This is going well."

I want to be a player that you have to watch. I think it speaks volumes when you are able to be in the back of the other team's mind. Knowing that every time No. 21 steps on the ice -- that's a player you're going to want to watch because something great is going to be created.

I developed this monster presence mantra. It's this power force that's super strong and is something that the women's game hasn't seen for a few years.