June Johnson was driving home to Quebec City from Maine on the night of January 30 when her car lost control on Highway 73 and flipped upside down into a ditch. She was hanging from her seatbelt, disoriented, in the dark and cold. Less than a minute later, four hockey players were at her window.
The players were members of Les Bataillon Saint-Hyacinthe, a team in the North American Hockey League, heading home from a game in the Beauce region. They saw the whole thing happen.
Samuel Loiselle, a newly traded defenceman, was the first to reach her. He sprinted to the overturned vehicle and pried open the door, fighting gravity the entire time. He could hear her screaming inside.
“I told her, ‘Are you OK? Do you have any injuries, you think?'” Loiselle recounted to CTV News. “She told me, ‘No, I just want to get out as fast as I can.’ I was like, ‘Alright, your head doesn’t hurt? Your neck?’ She says, ‘No, please get me out.'”
An arm reached in, unclicked the seatbelt, and the players pulled Johnson free. Then they stayed with her until paramedics arrived.
Johnson walked away without physical injuries. But the real story here goes deeper than a roadside rescue.
The California native, now living in Quebec City, revealed that she suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from what she described as “considerable, long-term trauma” eight years ago. She has been working through the healing process. She knows all too well that a violent car crash — hanging upside down, alone, on a freezing highway — could have set that recovery back catastrophically.
Instead, the opposite happened.
“The irony of this experience is that they pulled me out so quickly, and then they stood by me,” Johnson said, her voice breaking. “They could not have been kinder and did everything they could to help me.”
In the chaos of the moment, she never got their names. She never got to say thank you. So she reached out to CTV News, hoping to track them down.
After some coordination between all parties, Johnson and Loiselle were connected for a conversation. “Nice to meet you once again,” he told her. “In better conditions.”
“I cannot thank you guys enough,” she replied. “I think if you didn’t get me out of there so quickly, that would have been traumatizing.”
She told him what his actions meant, not just that night but for her broader recovery. “It gave me faith in humanity again. This is making a difference for the whole rest of my life.”
Loiselle paused. “Wow, that’s a very nice outcome for a bad situation.”
Hockey players carry a certain reputation — tough, aggressive, ready to drop gloves at a moment’s notice. But anyone who has spent real time around the sport knows the other side. These are kids, most of them teenagers and young adults in junior leagues, traveling long hours on buses through Canadian winters. They saw a car flip and they didn’t hesitate.
Johnson, who wore a maple leaf sweater for her CTV News interview, says she is now a devoted fan of Les Bataillon Saint-Hyacinthe. The team, she jokes, has earned themselves a supporter for life.
Conditions on Highway 73 can turn treacherous fast, and single-vehicle rollovers in ditches are disturbingly common across Quebec during the coldest months. Johnson was lucky she was not hurt, and lucky that someone happened to be right behind her.
The fact that it was a busload of hockey players feels almost too perfectly Canadian to be real. But it happened. And for one woman still piecing her life back together, it changed everything.
