There are days at a championship where the schedule looks busy, but the story ends up being about a single shot or, in this case, a single end.
For Martensville’s Nancy Martin and Rylan Kleiter, Tuesday at the Canadian Mixed Doubles Curling Championship in Surrey, B.C., turned into exactly that.
What was supposed to be a two-game slate became one, and it was the kind that lingers.
Martin and Kleiter dropped a 7-6 decision in an extra end to Ontario’s Serena Gray-Withers and Victor Pietrangelo in the afternoon draw. This game swung back and forth before ultimately coming down to the final rock.
Ontario set the tone early, coming out of the hack sharp and stealing one in the opening end. Saskatchewan responded the way veteran teams do, quickly and decisively, putting up three in the second to take control.
From there, it settled into a chess match.
The teams traded singles through the middle ends, each side waiting for an opening, each shot carrying a little more weight. That opening came in the seventh, and it was Ontario that capitalized, scoring three to flip a 5-3 deficit into a 6-5 lead heading home.
Faced with the game slipping away, Martin and Kleiter pushed back in the eighth. They applied pressure, made their shots, but couldn’t quite generate the multiple they needed, settling for one and sending the game to an extra end tied 6-6.
With hammer in the ninth, Gray-Withers and Pietrangelo didn’t waste the opportunity, scoring the single they needed to secure the 7-6 win.
It was a tough result in a game where Saskatchewan showed plenty of resilience but couldn’t quite find the knockout blow.
The evening game never came.
Martin and Kleiter were scheduled to return to the ice later in the day, but their opponents, Nick Mosher and Maria Christianson, were forced to forfeit due to injury, turning a long day into a short one.
So, instead of a chance to rebound immediately, Saskatchewan was left to sit with the loss.
Now 2-2 heading into Tuesday’s play, Martin and Kleiter remain very much in the mix, but in a field this tight, the extra-end games, the missed opportunities, and the inches that separate winning from losing start to matter a little more.
Martin and Kleiter will play Chicoutimi’s Robert Desjardins and Anne-Sophie Gionest in their lone game this afternoon.
