Emmie Allen was standing in goal in her keeper position last fall as Carolina women’s soccer took on Duke in Durham. The Tar Heels were dominating play—they would go on to win 3-0—and the ball was at the other end of the field. It was her redshirt freshman season, and her first Carolina-Duke game.

The High Point native had been raised a Tar Heel. Her family connections to Chapel Hill run deep; her grandfather attended Carolina on the GI Bill, her mother and aunt went to Carolina, and every holiday as a kid she would give her grandmother something UNC-related.

So it meant something to her when she looked around the Koskinen Stadium stands and noticed there were more Carolina fans in attendance than Duke fans.

“I literally got chills,” Allen said. “Even in the moment, I realized this was a dream come true.”

“The Duke game was the first game she played the entire game,” says her mother, Laura Allen (Emmie had split time in goal previously during her redshirt freshman campaign). “I remember standing there— because I have to stand by myself when she’s playing, I can’t sit around other people—and thinking, ‘I can’t believe I am standing at Duke and Emmie is playing for Carolina.’ I think about my dad all the time and how happy he would be if he could see her now.

My mom is 100 years old and she still asks Emmie every time she sees her, ‘Do you have a game today?’”

It’s a reasonable question, because Allen has had a game, or been getting ready for a game, most every day of her life. Her competitiveness became obvious early on; Laura remembers looking out the kitchen window when her daughter was two years old and suddenly being alarmed. ’Oh my gosh!” she thought, “she’s out there on a bike!”

But she smiles now when she remembers the scene. “She kept falling off,” Laura Allen says, “and she kept hopping right back on. That told me something.”

Her precocious daughter survived the bike with no major scars. She soon moved on to other competitive exploits, finding soccer at a young age and instantly falling in love with it. She moved into goalkeeping gradually, but once she got a taste, she was hooked.

Now she’s a standout on one of the best pitches in the United States. But even when she was playing on some rugged youth fields, there was just something about standing in front of the goal that captivated her.

Soon enough, it wasn’t just a vision. Allen redshirted her first year, a difficult absence from game competition for someone who thrives on game intensity.

But she didn’t treat it as a year off. Instead, she found a kindred soul in fellow North Carolina native Emily Moxley. The duo soon became workout companions, and very quickly began expanding their workouts beyond just the regularly scheduled practices.

Every single day, they arrived at the field more than 90 minutes before the start time. And every single day, they found a way to get in extra work for at least an hour before the regular team session.

“She’s one of the most committed people I’ve ever played with,” Moxley says. “I don’t think we planned on those extra practices. It just kind of got started on that first day and continued every single day after that. We pushed each other. She’s a keeper and I’m not, but it was easy to work together and find a way to make each other better.”

The pair weren’t doing the extra workouts to grab the attention of the coaching staff. And Allen had no idea if Anson Dorrance even knew they were happening.

She soon found out. In her postseason meeting he told her, “I notice everything you do. I know that you’re here early and you stay late.”

As if she needed any extra incentive, the legendary coach’s praise fueled her willingness to spend even more time on her game.

“I just love to practice,” she says. “To me, training is my bread and butter. I love what people call the grind, the painful part of the journey. I know that if I love that part, the reward is playing time.”

In 2022, the reward quickly became evident. After sharing goal with Marz Josephson early in the season, she moved into full-time duties by that first Duke game on Sept. 8. That’s where she stayed for the rest of an impressive season that took Carolina all the way to the national championship match against UCLA.

It sounds like a glorious script. Native Tar Heel helps guide dominant program back to the precipice of a title. Instead, it was the kind of experience that—even now, nearly a year later—you hesitate to bring up with her.

In that NCAA final against the Bruins, Carolina led 2-0 late in the match. But UCLA began to take momentum in the final 15 minutes, scored once with ten minutes left, and then got an extremely controversial goal with just 16 seconds remaining to tie the score. On that play, UCLA conveniently changed its alignment and put a bigger, more physical player in front of Allen. Allen took contact from that Bruin player, was knocked to the ground in the back of the net, and no foul was called.

After the dubious finish to regulation, the Bruins would go on to win, 3-2, in extra time.

In her room, Allen has two framed photos: one of she and Moxley celebrating a big Carolina win. The other of Allen on her knees after the final whistle against UCLA…and Moxley helping her up.

“I still don’t know how she had the strength to do that,” Allen says.

“She was such a huge part of our journey to get there,” Moxley says. “And I didn’t want her to be by herself in that moment.”

As you might expect, the moment lingered. Allen, an avid SportsCenter viewer, avoided the show for days on the chance that it might show highlights of the match. She has watched it back exactly once, crying through the final moments.

Virtually everyone involved with the play who isn’t directly affiliated with UCLA agrees the game-tying goal was a foul. Dorrance copied Allen on an email he sent to an officiating supervisor; even that official agreed it was a foul. During spring practice, Dorrance regularly referred to the 2022 team as national champions.

Allen now sees the disappointment as part of her journey. Her faith is important to her, and Laura remembers her daughter reading the Bible cover to cover on their many drives from High Point to Raleigh for soccer practice. It’s sometimes Emmie who persuades Laura that they need to get up and attend church in person rather than logging on for online service, and even this summer after summer league games, Emmie would curl up in a chair, after 11 p.m., reading her Bible.

“I was really down after the national championship,” she says. “I took some time to reflect and I redefined what greatness means to me. It’s not anything you accomplish. It’s the impact you have on people around you. My purpose is to show that if you work hard for your passion, then your dreams will come true. It sucked that I was the one who was fouled in the last 16 seconds of the national championship. But it also gave me a platform to express my beliefs. That happening caused a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise know who I am to click on my Instagram profile and learn about me and my beliefs. If you can lift up people around you, even when things aren’t going great for you, that matters.”

After working through a knee injury this spring—“It’s helped me to be Emmie Allen who is coming back from a knee injury and not Emmie Allen the keeper who got fouled in the national championship,” she says—she’ll be back in goal this fall. Carolina will once again be a national title contender and will play a formidable schedule against the country’s best opponents.

There is only one on-field goal: adding to the program’s stacked trophy case. And for their goalkeeper, that’s a dream she’s cultivated for years.

“I think it makes a tangible difference in the way I play because I’m representing North Carolina,” she says. “I remember being in elementary school and you’d watch a Carolina game the night before and that was all you’d talk about at school the next day. I’ve gotten to play in some of those games. Putting on that jersey and having the chance to win a national championship for Carolina is incredibly meaningful to me.”