A heart is a heart is a heart.

And you'd need plenty more to get out shot, out played and out scored – and continue fighting till it's over – the way Team Yukon's Canada Winter Games girls hockey team did in Halifax, N.S., last week.

But that kind of fight is uncommon.

Even for Yukon athletes, who have to fight continually to get the mandatory game experience (funds, too?) needed to simply play.

But that's how the battle lines were drawn.

And given the chance, I imagine Yukon athletes would do little else but cross that line.

The girls' hockey team did, and the result was this: 81 goals against, 336 shots on goal and a goals against average of 16.20 – in five games – according to hockeycanada.ca.

Another 10 goals came in the Yukon's sixth and final game, against New Brunswick.

Lord knows how many shots on goal that game added to the Yukon's total.

Leave it to a gloomy cynic hiding behind a keyboard to highlight the negative.

But here's what mattered to a team of girls with an average age of roughly 14 years old (playing against 18 year olds): a .759 save percentage, 255 saves – and one goal – in five games.

Dana van Vliet scored that goal, assisted by Tamara Greek and Adrianne Dewhurst, in their 12-1 loss to hosts Nova Scotia.

Meanwhile, Yukon goaltender Jocelyn Wynnyk stopped shot after shot after shot and let in goal after goal but kept her eyes on the puck until she was relieved for the third period of the game against Nova Scotia.

In the end, according to coach Louis Bouchard, Wynnyk played more minutes than anyone in the tournament.

In the end, too, Bouchard admitted that his team wasn't ready for what they faced at the Canada Games.

Maybe that's indisputable, at least according to the statistics.

But part of what makes the underdog the fan favourite – as the Yukon girls were in Halifax – is that which you can't see or quantify.

It's opposite of the Hollywood script, in which the underdog invariably rises from seemingly permanent defeat to win in time for the audience to go home satisfied for a couple hours until they have to trudge back into work.

Yukon athletes and teams follow no such script.

Take the Dawson Nuggets trudging to Ottawa to play for the Stanley Cup in 1905.

We all know what happened: they lost – they lost big time.

But, as someone remarked during Scotiabank Hockey Day in Canada last month, we're still talking about the Nuggets.

We know the score, the statistics. But we don't know what mechanism forced those fools to start and finish. Heart and glory and determination and innumerable other trite words which make us so bored, probably.

I wonder how many times these insufferable words ran through Jocelyn Wynnyk's head when she stopped her 255th puck.

I'm guessing that mechanism which started mysteriously – and now wanted to quit – was working too hard to do anything else but play.

Perhaps in another 100 years or more we'll have found the proper expression to describe what athletes like Wynnyk have that we enjoy watching.

Right now lets settle on heart.