“Both my parents were a little skeptical,” Crosby said. “I think they wanted to make sure I wanted to play for me and not just because of my brother. They wanted me to feel like I was my own person and I didn’t pick goalie just to be kind of different from him, but that I actually wanted to be a goalie.”

Crosby attended Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Faribault, Minn., a hockey talent factory whose alumni include several members of the United States women’s national team. (Her brother also attended the boarding school for one year.)

When she was 17, Crosby, too, started gaining recognition at the highest levels of women’s hockey. During the summer of 2013, she was invited to a junior camp held by Hockey Canada and traveled to Sheffield, England, for a camp run by the International Ice Hockey Federation.

After graduating from Shattuck, Crosby enrolled at Northeastern. But she never found her footing in Boston and transferred after one year. The invitations to prestigious camps and tryouts also tapered off. As her hockey career reached its first detour, she began thinking about the game in more abstract terms.

“To sum it up, it just wasn’t the right fit,” Crosby said. “It seemed like the right fit at the time, but when I got there, whether it was playing time — it just didn’t feel like home.”

Crosby thought a return to Minnesota could be stabilizing. At St. Cloud State, she was not given any promises for playing time, but she saw an environment similar to Cole Harbour’s. With Shattuck classmates in abundance there, the small-town atmosphere meshed well with the pace she sought in her life and granted her a degree of anonymity.

When a new class arrives on campus, incoming freshmen can become star-struck when they discover Crosby’s lineage. But older teammates have become cognizant to quickly address any overbearing inquiries.