MILAN — It was decision day for the best U.S. women’s hockey players, and Rory Guilday was cautiously confident despite being cut from the team a year earlier.

Still, Guilday didn’t tell anybody, not even her parents, that national team director Katie Million was scheduled to call her (and the rest of the player pool individually) to disclose who made the Olympic roster.

“I felt good about my play, and I felt like I showed what I needed to show,” Guilday said. “Anything after that was just, if it happened, it happened.”

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Guilday answered the phone on that day, a little over a month ago. Million’s message was to the point. “You earned your spot,” or something to that effect.

“I was in shock,” Guilday remembered, speaking after the team’s second practice in Milan on Sunday. “Can’t really process it in that moment.”

Guilday is a 23-year-old defender from Chanhassen, Minnesota, which is best known as the site of Prince’s Paisley Park. She is the only one on the 23-player Olympic roster who was a healthy cut from the 2025 world championship-winning team.

“She just took the advice (from 2025) that, ‘Hey, you’ve got to figure out your game a little bit more, especially on the defensive side,’” U.S. head coach John Wroblewski said. “It was just a little bit of maturation in her defensive instincts.”

Guilday began playing hockey around age 5. In Minnesota, you’re put in skates right after you start walking, she jokes.

In recent interviews, Guilday has shared her life-changing story. A routine seventh-grade eye test led to an MRI and a revelation that she had an optic nerve glioma, or a benign tumor, that was growing and starting to affect the vision in her right eye.

She did chemotherapy for nine months — spending up to eight hours a day in the hospital — to keep it from spreading to her left eye. Still, she lost most of her vision in the right eye.

“These days, I don’t really think of it as a super sob story type of thing,” she said on the “Jocks in Jills” podcast. “It’s just part of who I am these days. Yeah, chemotherapy is not something that’s enjoyable. It’s really hard on the body and soul, too, I’d say, and the people around you. I lost a ton of my strength in my body. Skating was my identity as a hockey player when I was younger. So when I started chemotherapy, and I would step onto the ice, and I felt like I couldn’t hold myself up with my ankles, that was super devastating.”

Guilday went nearly a year without playing in a hockey game. Once back in action in high school, she adapted, regaining confidence and fearlessness.

Her brain adjusted, too. Her vision is no longer a thought when she’s skating, driving or simply walking.

“Pretty much, my left eye has just taken over,” she said in October. “My body is using my left eye. It’s not really using my right eye. I have, like, 20/15 vision in my left eye now, so I call it my eagle eye.”

She played on world championship teams in 2022, 2023 and 2024 (all while a Cornell student-athlete) and got drafted fifth overall by the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s Ottawa Charge last June.

When she was a kid, Guilday watched the Olympics with her three siblings, holding a mom-made tin-foil-and-paper torch.

On Thursday, she will suit up for her first Olympic hockey game. The U.S. plays Czechia at 10:40 a.m. ET (USA Network and Peacock). Her whole family is coming, having booked travel to Italy after learning she made the team.

Guilday said she’s thankful for what she went through in middle school, which temporarily separated her from the sport.

“It makes you really appreciate when you do get to play,” she said.