HOCKEY - Dream a reality tonight

It took a while for the truth to sink in, but tonight the sporting dream is about to become very real for Black Sticks hockey debutant Anna Thorpe.
Thorpe is one of five Northlanders who will play the first of five trial games for the New Zealand women's hockey team at Albany tonight, this one against Korea.
It is the first step in a ruthless selection battle with the Beijing Olympics the main objective.
But even as late as last night Thorpe was still trying to convince herself that all this talk about international hockey was fair dinkum.
The striker might have been at the sharp end of the Northland women's hockey team as they made a surprise charge into the provincial reckoning this year.
But even now Thorpe thinks her eight goal haul for Northland was nice but a bit of a fluke.
She is expecting reality to dawn when she slips on the Blacks Sticks uniform tonight though.
"I don't know really what to expect. I'm nervous, excited ... I don't know, I'm just really still coming to terms with it all," Thorpe said.
"For me getting picked in the first place was a huge surprise, like coming from left-right-out, I had no idea anything was coming," she said.
The build up to the first trial game has been low key though. While the matches will not be given full test status, Thorpe and her Northland team mates Charlotte Harrison, Laura Douglas, Jasmine McQuinn and Kelsey Dunn know it is their big chance to impress coach Kevin Towns.
Harrison is the only Black Sticks incumbent among them, but Douglas is trying to make a comeback while Dunn and McQuinn are seen as players of the future. They are both still schoolgirls.
The quintet have spent the last few weeks working together under the tutelage of former Black Stick men's players Alan Lints and Grant McLeod, time Thorpe says has been invaluable.
Contact with Towns, the national coach, has been via email only.
They won't even meet their new Black Sticks team mates until they assemble in Auckland this afternoon.
But Thorpe isn't fooled by the low key build up. She knows this is her big chance for a ticket to the Beijing Olympics next year.
"We have been given this opportunity and if we don't grab it now we might never get another one. The Olympics only come every four years and we have a chance to get there," she said.
"There are 28 girls in the squad, eight get dropped after this series then another four from the 20 remaining. I reckon I'm at the bottom of that heap, there are amazing players in the squad, so what have I got to loose."
The game tonight is scheduled to start at 6pm.