PWHL superfan Debbie Harrison 'living the dream' while soaking up league's inaugural season

It takes Debbie Harrison more than two hours to make her way from her home in Lindsay, Ont., to downtown Toronto.

It starts with an hour-long drive, followed by a 45-minute GO Train trip, and finally, Harrison's favourite part of the journey, a 40-minute walk through Toronto.

When she arrives at the historic old Maple Leaf Gardens (now called the Mattamy Athletic Centre), she finds her seat right in front of the glass, where she's been close enough to see the smiles on the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) Toronto players' faces all season long.

Once she's in the arena, Harrison is hard to miss.

When her jersey didn't arrive in time for puck drop on the first PWHL game on Jan. 1, she got creative. She's made a different outfit for every home game this season, including a crayon the shade of PWHL purple, a homemade Toronto jersey with buttons for all 26 players on Toronto's roster, and the one that garnered the most reaction inside the rink: a PWHL referee costume, complete with accurate logos on her stripes. 

The cameras on the PWHL broadcasts have lingered on the faces of the young girls in the stands, waving signs that say the players on the ice give them something to work toward and dream about.

But the creation of the PWHL has been just as much of a dream come true for 64-year-old Harrison, who's loved hockey long before there were any professional female players to call a role model.

"I know they're looking to younger people," Harrison said in an interview with CBC Sports.

"But we have watched the progression, and we've lived the dream, even though it didn't really have an end to it. So I think I'm as excited as the players."

Sitting in a sold-out Scotiabank Arena, where more than 19,000 fans watched Toronto defeat Montreal earlier this month, was a moment Harrison couldn't have imagined in her wildest dreams. Maybe one she thought she'd never see in her lifetime.

Another one of her happiest hockey memories was close to her heart that night, illustrated on a pin on her PWHL shirt. It's a button with a photo of 11-year-old Harrison and her younger brothers, Andy and Stephen.

They're wearing NHL jerseys and posing on a frozen river, where they used to play hockey from the moment the sun came up until it was time to trudge home in the dark.

That photo was taken on Dec. 20, 1970, during a day of hockey on Beaver River outside the Harrison home in Cannington, Ont., a small community about 70 kilometres west of Peterborough.

Boys and girls from across the community came to play on that river, using makeshift sticks with plastic blades curved at home in a bucket of piping hot water. They used sawhorses as nets, and anyone who showed up in a snowsuit was likely to find themselves playing goalie.