This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

About 30 games into her midget triple-A season, Hayley Wickenheiser was pulled aside by her coach after getting off the bus. She didn't know what to expect from the conversation but never would have guessed it would go the way it did.

She was performing well as the only girl on the team. Her abilities were not in question. But none of that mattered. The coach told her he couldn't handle having a girl on the team anymore and that he'd have to let her go.

"He was brutally honest," says Wickenheiser. "It was a tough one."

She was stunned, almost left speechless. The disappointment and shock she experienced the day she was released from her team for simply not being a boy is something she hopes no girl will have to experience again.

"For little girls now, it's way easier to play hockey in Canada than it was when I started but it's not just because of me, it's because of everything our women's national team has done through the years," she says.

Nearly 25 years after that low point, the freshly-retired Wickenheiser walks away a hockey legend, the greatest woman to ever play the game. Her accolades are endless, but it's not her five Olympic medals or 13 world championship medals that she's most proud of when she looks back on her career. Make no mistake, those accomplishments are greatly important to her. But what she holds the most pride in is the way her success, along with that of her teammates, has forever changed the way women's hockey is viewed.

"I'm proud that when I walk through an airport or a mall and someone comes up to me, in particular, a grown man who will say, 'I wasn't really a fan of women's hockey but I enjoy watching you girls,' or something like that, that's kind of a cool moment," says Wickenheiser.

Bob Nicholson, who served as president and CEO of Hockey Canada from 1998 until 2014, believes that Wickenheiser's greatest impact is how she transformed the game for girls. What Wickenheiser did for young girls off the ice, he says, will be her lasting legacy.

"She really has helped to give all young females in our country a goal that so many young boys had over the years and that was to put on a Canadian jersey, represent their country and win gold medals," Nicholson says.

In the almost 20 years since Nicholson took the helm of Hockey Canada, he says that the growth of women's hockey has exploded. In the late 90s, he recalled, when Wickenheiser was rising to prominence, there were about 15,000 girls registered to play in Canada. Today, that number is over 85, 000.

Growing up in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, Wickenheiser could not think of a particularly unique reason as to why she fell in love with hockey. Her parents—Tom and Marilyn—were both teachers and volunteered a lot at the local rink which meant she was often brought along. She loved the way the game looked, the way it felt, and everything about being around the rink.

While we all know of a famous backyard rink in Brantford, Ontario—home of the most decorated player of all time, Wayne Gretzky—perhaps there should be an equally famous one in Shaunavon.

Wickenheiser's father would build one in their yard for Hayley, her sister Jane, and brother Ross. Alongside her siblings, and what she figures was a group of about 30 neighbourhood kids, Wickenheiser learned to skate in her backyard and at the local rink where her parents volunteered.

At that point, when she first began playing as a young girl, she was embraced with open arms.

"In a small town, having another body, you filled a team so I was always welcomed and I had some really great coaches in minor hockey who believed in me and saw that I had a lot of drive and passion to play the hockey," she says.

It was not until she began climbing the ranks to higher levels where she noticed blatant sexism. Where she noticed that because she was a female she was not received quite as warmly as the male players.

"They didn't want the girls to be there in a lot of cases—parents from other teams or even boys from other teams that I played against in bantam or midget triple-A when the stakes were higher," she recalls.

She figures if she did not have thick skin, it would have been enough to make her quit the game.

"But I loved to play, so I was just like, 'OK, this is what I signed up to deal with and I have to carry on,'" she says.

And as she did continue to play, Wickenheiser would go on to revolutionize the way women's hockey was viewed, helping to carry the Canadian national team to four consecutive Olympic gold medals over a 23-year career on the greatest stage possible.

"She always had a high level of compete standards," says Melody Davidson, the general manager of Hockey Canada's female national team programs and a former coach of Wickenheiser. "You always knew you were going to get her best every time whether it was a midget team, a lower-ranked international or just a red/white game, she was going to prepare the same way and perform to her best."

"In a lot of ways, she professionalized our sport by challenging everything we were doing on a constant basis, which is a positive."

In 1998 and 1999, Wickenheiser was invited to participate in the Philadelphia Flyers rookie camp. Later, in 2003, she became the first woman to score a goal in a men's professional hockey game while with the Kirkkonummi Salamat team in Finland's division II league.

In showing that she could not just keep up but also compete effectively against men, Wickenheiser helped earned respect for the women's game.

"When she was invited to the Flyers rookie camp, everyone was kind of like, 'Oh, wait, really? This is cool. This girl is keeping up with these guys, this is unbelievable,'" says Tessa Bonhomme, a former teammate who won a gold medal with Wickenheiser at the 2010 Olympics. "With that, she won a lot of respect and won a lot of people over for the women's game."

"Having lived it, having played it in a time where I think we should be much more progressive, I understand how hard that is and to have her do that back in 1998 was something beyond itself. It was unbelievable and amazing."

"Her ability to be able to play in the men's game in Finland, this brought more attention to Hayley but also to women's hockey that helped to elevate it to a level that it would not have gotten to without her being able to achieve that goal," adds Nicholson.

What Bonhomme felt Wickenheiser did was essentially put an end to the phrase, "You shoot like a girl."

"She took that slogan and she owned it and she made it a good thing," says Bonhomme. "You'd look at Hayley and be like, 'Yeah, you wish you could.' She turned it into an empowering thing for girls."

So did it really matter to young girls that Wickenheiser was transcending the women's game and competing with men? To Bonhomme, it sure did.

"In gym class, me and my best friend Kara, we were very athletic and competitive but we always wanted to take it to the guys to prove that we could play with them or be just as good," she explains. "That's what Hayley was doing but she was doing it on an international stage, so in our feelings, we weren't alone, there was someone else out there doing the same thing."

After her own retirement in 2010, Bonhomme travelled across Canada running girls-only hockey schools. She remembers registration was packed with people clamoring for a spot. It was then she started to realize the impact Wickenheiser and the rest of the national team's success had had on driving interest in women's hockey.

What really drove the point home for Bonhomme was the names of the girls who signed up to attend her hockey school tour.

"The number of the young girls that were named Hayley and Cassie [after former Team Canada captain Cassie Campbell-Pascall] was mind-blowing," says Bonhomme. "I thought that's pretty cool that that number—and it was spelled the exact same way, as well—of kids were named, probably after those two girls."

Whether she wanted it or not, like Gretzky and Mark Messier from those great 1980s Oilers teams she grew up idolizing, Wickenheiser played herself to a position where she is viewed as the gold standard for female players. When people think of women's hockey, she is likely the first name that comes to mind.

"I don't think about it like that, this is just what comes with the territory when you're fortunate enough to be one of a few women who have pushed through the game and played as long as I have," says Wickenheiser. "It's certainly very flattering and complimentary and I do see it as a responsibility to help continue to grow the game and make it even easier for girls to play. But I never played to have all this or because of all of that, if anything it's just a by-product that shows how much I love the game."

Having been with the national team for 23 years, there's a big generation of fans who simply don't remember hockey without Wickenheiser a part of it. Her retirement truly is the end of an era.

"I was surprised, I thought it was a little out of left field just because, I don't know, it's just hard to imagine hockey without Hayley," says Bonhomme, still trying to reconcile the thought of hockey without her. "Growing up, I watched her play from the beginning of her career to the point where when I began my career with the national team, she was there. And then when I moved on from hockey, she was still there."

Since she was a little girl, Wickenheiser's other dream was to be a doctor. Already accepted to medical school, it played a part in her decision to close her career as a player and move on to the next chapter of her life. But while her playing days are over, we likely haven't seen Wickenheiser's final mark on the game just yet.

When Dawn Braid joined the Arizona Coyotes as a skating coach last fall and, in the process, made history as the first full-time female NHL coach, Wickenheiser told VICE Sports, "We still have yet to see a female as a head or an assistant coach in the NHL, so that will be the next step. But hiring a woman full time in a position like this is obviously very important."

At the time, you could not help but wonder if the trailblazer from Shaunavon was thinking about doing a little bit more trailblazing down the road.

"I don't think I can honestly say I've put hockey to bed," she says. "At this point I don't know exactly where I'm going to go with it. Being involved in the NHL would appeal to me at some point but I do think that there is more room in the game for women whether it's in women's hockey or men's hockey."

What does Davidson see in Wickenheiser's future?

"The sky's the limit, really," he says, "There will be a lot of doors open and a lot of things that can be discussed with her whether it is with Hockey Canada, the NHL or internationally. I have no doubt that there are many more great things left for her in our game. And, because of that, our game will be even better moving forward."