DURHAM, N.C. — Seated at a postgame press conference after a grueling overtime loss to Northwestern, North Carolina coach Erin Matson, along with players Sietske Brüning and Ryleigh Heck, was a long way from where she had been almost exactly three years ago.
During a 2022 season when the Tar Heels’ now-seniors were freshmen and now-coach was a senior playing on the team, the trio combined for five points — two goals and an assist — in UNC’s national championship victory over the Wildcats.
While the three of them saw their 2025 campaign come to an end Friday afternoon, another teammate from that 2022 title-winning squad walked away with a much more favorable outcome: a return ticket to the sport’s grandest stage.
As the ’Cats mounted a thrilling comeback to triumph 4-3, junior forward Ashley Sessa, who transferred from UNC to NU ahead of the 2024 season, took down her former teammates for the first time since switching schools.
They didn’t seem to care.
“Honestly, I don’t think we paid much attention to that,” Brüning said when asked about Sessa after Friday’s game. “We see Northwestern as a team and we would treat her as any other player on their team.”
Heck’s seeming indifference toward a player who played alongside her for 56 minutes in the 2022 title game went even further, referring to Sessa as “other situations” the team didn’t distract itself with when focusing on the task at hand.
Regardless of Sessa’s complex history with the Tar Heels, she’d be difficult to ignore for any team scouting the ’Cats.
The junior, who took an Olympic redshirt year and was not rostered with either program in 2023, has led NU in both goals and assists in both of her seasons in Evanston. In her 2024 First-Team All-American campaign, she led the Big Ten and was second in the nation in points.
For a brief moment on Friday, when she was awarded with tipping in the game-winning goal in overtime, her daunting presence against a team she once played for seemed to reach its most romantic conclusion.
But immediately after the game, she was quick to clear up any confusion.
“I actually didn’t have the game-winner, that was Grace Schulze,” she said. “I didn’t touch it.”
For coach Tracey Fuchs, Sessa’s insistence to have the goal removed from her own stat sheet “speaks to the character we have.”
In reality, Schulze was attempting to dish the ball to Sessa in front of the goal, but it never reached her teammate. Instead, the pass got tangled up between Brüning’s feet and she kicked it into the net to seal NU’s victory.
While the semifinal contest had clear echoes of 2022, it wasn’t the only time the powerhouse programs faced off with their seasons on the line.
On a Final Four Friday preceding a Thanksgiving Thursday, Fuchs said she was “grateful” for the attention high-stakes games against UNC bring to the sport, but joked that discussing NU’s 2023 National Championship loss to the Tar Heels is enough to give her PTSD.
In that game, it took two 10-minute rounds of sudden-death overtime and 12 one-on-one shootout attempts for Heck to seal the deal for the squad decked out in Carolina blue. Following the loss, former NU goalkeeper Annabel Skubisz, who had conceded an NCAA-fewest 15 goals that season, solemnly walked off the field, shaking her head.
“I think everybody was ready for the next year to have that rematch game and it didn’t happen,” Fuchs said, referring to North Carolina’s 2024 semifinal loss to St. Joseph’s.
Now, two years later, when the ’Cats finally got their revenge, another Skubisz sister experienced the same crushing blow for UNC that Annabel did in 2023.
Tar Heel keeper Merritt Skubisz, who splits time between the pipes for Matson’s group, laid on the ground after her game-ending save attempt ended in vain. Her sister’s former teammates rushed across the field, jumping up and down and celebrating so hard they too fell into the turf in front of her.
Asked about being forced to comeback from what was once a two-goal deficit, Sessa responded with a big smile on her face.
“Oh we love it,” she said. “We’re called the Cardiac ’Cats.”
Following the nerve-wracking win, Fuchs’ squad will enjoy a day off Saturday as it prepares to take on Princeton — the only team that’s beaten NU all season — in Sunday’s national title game.
The 17-year head coach said she hopes her team gets some much-needed rest, but admitted that she has her own work cut out for her before a tilt with the Tigers.
“Hopefully they’ll get eight-to-10 hours of sleep tonight and I’ll get five-to-seven,” she said. “That would be a great thing right now.”
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