There was no snow falling a year ago in downtown St. Paul on the afternoon of Feb. 21, yet Warroad goalie Payton Rolli found herself being pelted on the ice regardless.
Her Warriors were facing Orono in the semifinals of the Class A state tournament. The Spartans’ strategy for dethroning the three-time defending state champs from the west shore of Lake of the Woods was a simple one: Shoot the puck.
Over the course of three periods and three overtimes, Orono sent 62 pucks at Rolli, including 15 in the second overtime. She stopped 61 of them in what was, eventually, a 2-1 win. For Rolli, the workload was daunting.
“It just kept going. It was such a long game, and it didn’t seem like it was going to end soon at all,” Rolli said this week. “They scored the first goal, it took us a period to get another goal back, and then we were just back and forth throughout the whole game. It was a really good game, but I think all of us were really tired by the end.”
Rolli’s poise and reflexes in the marathon win caught the eye of more than one college scout in attendance that day. Her coach said any scout that didn’t make a few notes about Rolli after that show should maybe explore other employment.
“She was good,” said David Marvin, who has coached Warroad to five state titles, and will be seeking a fourth in the past five years this week in the program’s 11th straight trip to St. Paul. “In that game she stopped 61 out of 62, so Ray Charles would’ve noticed her. She caught everybody’s eye.”
Warroad opens the 2026 tournament with an 11 a.m. quarterfinal Wednesday versus Luverne at Grand Casino Arena.
Born in Wyoming, Rolli began playing goalie as a nine-year-old in Minot, N.D., with her father working in the oil business. The family moved to Warroad three years ago and Rolli backstopped the Warriors’ 2024 state title. She had already made recruiting visits to Maine and several schools in Boston, but opted to stay in-state and go to college in the place where her parents met after Minnesota Gophers coach Brad Frost made an offer.
“Her numbers are really, really good. We had watched her off and on, but certainly the state tournament last year was where she really kind of peaked our interest,” Frost said. “She is appropriately aggressive. She anticipates well. She’s not huge, but she’s not small, so she’s got good enough size. I think the biggest thing we’re looking forward to is to be playing at a higher level and being coached to see where she can get to.”
She will be the first Gopher from Warroad since 2005 Ms. Hockey winner Gigi Marvin.
Rolli arrives in St. Paul with a 1.26 goals against average and a .934 saves percentage after going 21-5-1 this season. She has 10 shutouts, including blanking Crookston and East Grand Forks in Warroad’s pair of Section 8A playoff wins, and is one of five finalists for the Jori Jones Award, which goes to the state’s top prep goalie.
On-ice hiccups have been rare for the Warriors this season, who last lost on Jan. 22 at Edina in a game that was scheduled for the Hockey Day Minnesota rink in Hastings, but was moved inside at the last minute due to frigid temperatures. Marvin said perhaps Rolli’s biggest asset is an ability to reset her mind and body quickly when things don’t go according to plan.
“Sometimes we score and sometimes we don’t, so it’s pretty good to get big saves until we can get something on the board,” Marvin said. “One thing I’ve always liked about Payton is that if something does beat her, she’s able to turn the page. She focuses and goes from there. So I feel pretty good about going to St. Paul this week with number one in our net.”
NEW ORLEANS, La. (AP) — As people head back to work Tuesday after the long holiday weekend, beads will be flying, crawfish boiling and parades rolling in New Orleans as the city celebrates Mardi Gras.
Mardi Gras, also known as Fat Tuesday, marks the climax and end of the weekslong Carnival season and a final chance for indulgence, feasting and revelry before the Christian Lent period of sacrifice and reflection. The joyous goodbye to Carnival always falls the day before Ash Wednesday.
Among the final parades in Louisiana’s most populous city, which is world-famous for its Mardi Gras bash, is one hosted by the Zulu Social Aide & Pleasure Club.
New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno, right, attends the annual Krewe of Muses parade during the Mardi Gras season on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026, in New Orleans. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
Attendees participate in the annual Krewe of Hermes Parade during the Mardi Gras season on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, in New Orleans. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
Attendees participate in the annual Krewe of Hermes Parade during the Mardi Gras season on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, in New Orleans. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
Boyfriend on her float takes part in the annual Krewe of Freret parade during the Mardi Gras season on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2026, in New Orleans. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
Attendees participate in the annual Krewe of Muses parade during the Mardi Gras season on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026, in New Orleans. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
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New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno, right, attends the annual Krewe of Muses parade during the Mardi Gras season on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026, in New Orleans. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
Marchers and float riders in the Zulu parade wear African-inspired garb and toss “throws” — trinkets that include plastic beads, candy, doubloons, stuffed animals, cups and toys. This parade’s signature “throw” is hand-decorated coconuts, coveted items that many revelers hope for.
Later in the day Rex, the King of Carnival parade will roll along St. Charles Avenue, lined by paradegoers and stately oak trees covered in Spanish moss and beads.
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Carnival events are popular for their spectacular and enormous floats, and also the intricately crafted outfits worn, such as Black masking Indians, whose beaded and bejeweled costumes are topped with feathered headdresses, or paradegoers walking the French Quarter in homemade costumes that capture the unique spirit of the Big Easy.
The good times will roll not just in New Orleans but all across the state, from exclusive balls to the Cajun French tradition of the Courir de Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday Run — a rural event in Central Louisiana featuring costumed participants performing, begging for ingredients and chasing after live chickens to be cooked in a communal gumbo.
Parades are also held in other Gulf Coast cities such as Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, and there are other world-renowned celebrations in Brazil and Europe.
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Mikaela Shiffrin likes to invoke the adage from tennis great Billie Jean King that “pressure is a privilege.” Even if, at times, it doesn’t quite feel like it.
And it might not at the moment for the American skiing star as she prepares for her third and final race at the Milan Cortina Olympics.
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Shiffrin heads into Wednesday’s slalom still looking for her first medal at Tofane and her first Olympic medal in a staggering eight years. A bafflingly slow performance in the slalom during women’s combined last week cost Shiffrin and teammate Breezy Johnson a spot on the podium.
The winningest ski racer in history felt faster and more confident during the giant slalom a few days later, with her 11th-place finish more a testament to what she described as the “greatest show” GS had put on in quite some time than her actual performance. Shiffrin was just three-tenths of a second off the podium, a razor-thin margin in an event where the time gap between the winners and the rest of the field is usually far greater.
Shiffrin’s meticulous preparation for her signature discipline — she’s already wrapped up a record ninth World Cup series title in slalom with two races remaining — included reacclimating herself to the singular rhythm of an event where tempo is everything.
You’d think after 71 slalom wins — including seven this year alone — that would be no big deal. At this point in the 30-year-old’s career, it’s not.
“No matter how many runs of slalom I do it never gets easier,” said Shiffrin, who collected her first Olympic gold in the event as a teenager in Sochi a dozen years ago. “It only gets like you become more aware of how challenging it is.”
And that’s just the physical part. The mental side is another matter entirely.
United States’ Mikaela Shiffrin visualizes the course ahead of the second run of an alpine ski, women’s giant slalom race, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Marco Trovati)
Shiffrin carries the burden of expectations that are part of the deal — fairly or unfairly — when you cut and paste your name all over your sport’s record book. She has been characteristically transparent while discussing wrangling with those expectations, even though in many ways they’re well outside of her control.
She arrived in the Dolomite Mountains confident those forgettable days in Beijing four years ago, when she failed to medal in any of the six events she entered, were behind her. The uncharacteristically slow run in the women’s combined left her mystified and subdued. The aggressiveness she displayed in the GS left her upbeat and optimistic.
Still, when she stands in the starter’s house during the final women’s alpine race of these Olympics, the standard set for her will be different from everyone else, including reigning gold medalist Petra Vlhova of Slovakia.
“I can imagine what she’s feeling right now,” Vlhova said. “But … she’s strong and I believe she can make it. It takes a lot of energy but I believe that she can do it.”
Vlhova has taken her own winding path back to this moment. She shredded multiple ligaments in her right knee in January 2024 and didn’t return to competition until the women’s combined on Feb. 10. She didn’t finish her run, but it also, in a way, didn’t matter as she hits what she described as the “restart” button.
During Vlhova’s absence, Shiffrin has cemented her legacy. Her career World Cup wins in all disciplines currently stands at 108 and counting, including eight in her last nine slalom starts dating to the end of last season.
United States’ Mikaela Shiffrin at the finish area of an alpine ski, women’s giant slalom race, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
She is, by every measure, the best skier in the field. Yet the course is a little flatter and perhaps a little easier than what they usually encounter. There’s a very real chance things could be just as tight on Wednesday as they were during the GS. Maybe even closer.
It means Shiffrin’s margin for error during her two runs might be smaller than usual, and she knows it. Her run in the women’s combined, when she was 15th, her worst ranking in a slalom race she’s started and finished since 2012, caught her off guard.
A dedicated student of her craft, Shiffrin believes her skis got misaligned a few times. The flat light on a gray afternoon played a factor, too. So did a mentality that she admitted didn’t match the moment, something she’ll try to address as she aims to end her fourth trip to the Olympics on an up note.
“I’m kind of going into it with my eyes open that we can see a very similar situation and I will try to handle it differently in my head,” she said.
Such is the challenge that is unique to this once-every-four-years spectacle. There is little debate that Shiffrin is the Greatest of All Time. Her struggles under this specific spotlight, however, have put her in a strange and perhaps unenviable spot.
She has tried to handle it with grace. U.S. Skiing and Snowboarding president Sophie Goldschmidt called Shiffrin “the ultimate role model” and, even as she grappled with how a spot on the podium in the combined got away, she made it a point to give longtime teammates Jackie Wiles and Paula Moltzan their flowers after earning their first Olympic medals.
Whatever happens, those who know Shiffrin well believe she will leave it all out there. If she does that she can make peace with the result, whatever it may be.
“She has a lot of experience,” Vlhova said. “She knows how to deal with it and as I said, I believe that she can make it.”
AP Sports Writer Andrew Dampf contributed to this story.
CHICAGO (AP) — From the moment the Rev. Jesse Jackson stepped forward as torchbearer to what was then a largely Southern civil rights struggle — a movement with much unfinished business — he created a bridge.
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From the South’s fight with Jim Crow to the North’s battle with systemic racial inequality, from the buttoned-up, conservative generation of King’s circle to the dashiki-wearing Black Power leaders and the activists of the hip-hop generation, Jackson forged a link between improbable dreams and political power.
“From Martin Luther King to Barack Obama, there’s a bridge called Jesse Jackson,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said.
Jackson, a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader’s assassination, died on Tuesday, his family said. He was 84.
Jackson kept up his public advocacy for racial justice, economic and political inclusion, and civil and human rights for more than a half-century, even after a neurological disorder in his later years affected his ability to move and speak.
Weighing in on political events, supporting the families of Black Americans killed by police and participating in COVID-19 vaccination drives to battle hesitancy in Black communities, Jackson built on a career that included running for president, international diplomacy and influencing the lexicon of racial identity in America.
Jackson clearly wasn’t the lion he had been toward the end, but his presence at racial justice protests and COVID-19 advocacy events, and his arrest outside the U.S. Capitol while calling on Congress to end the filibuster to protect voting rights displayed the bite left in his bark.
“We’ve always had a place for him,” said the Rev. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and one of many activists who have followed in his footsteps. Jackson urged them to “live life so that it’s not your alarm clock that awakes you in the morning, but a purpose. … A purpose will get you up when you want to stay down.”
FILE – Democratic presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson with his wife, Jacqueline, salutes the cheering crowd at Operation Push in Chicago, March 10, 1988. (AP Photo/Fred Jewell, File)
FILE – Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., right, and his aide Rev. Jesse Jackson are seen in Chicago, Aug. 19, 1966. (AP Photo/Larry Stoddard, File)
FILE – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., second from right, stands with Hosea Williams, left, Jesse Jackson, second from left, and Ralph Abernathy, right, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., a day before he was assassinated at approximately the same place, April 3, 1968. (AP Photo/Charles Kelly, File)
FILE – Rev. Jesse Jackson speaks to reporters at the Operation PUSH Soul Picnic in New York on March 26, 1972. With him are Tom Todd, vice president of PUSH, from second left, Aretha Franklin and Louis Stokes. (AP Photo/Jim Wells, File)
FILE – Rev. Jesse Jackson waves as he steps to the podium during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 27, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
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FILE – Democratic presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson with his wife, Jacqueline, salutes the cheering crowd at Operation Push in Chicago, March 10, 1988. (AP Photo/Fred Jewell, File)
At George Floyd’s memorial service, Jackson’s plaintive call, “I can’t breathe!” pierced the collective silence in a Minneapolis cathedral. He cried out twice more as the minutes ticked by to symbolize how long Floyd had a police officer’s knee pressed on his neck.
It was not only Jackson’s powerful expression of his own grief over Floyd’s death, which sparked global protests against racial injustice. It was a reminder that his voice still carried the singular resonance that for decades made him an international figure for civil and human rights.
Jackson returned to rally demonstrators marching through downtown Minneapolis, and stood with Floyd’s family when a jury convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin of murder in Floyd’s death. “Even if we win,” he told the marchers, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
“I think the fact that he came and then came back for the judge’s verdict, suffering with Parkinson’s, shows the determination that Jesse Jackson had all the way to the end,” Sharpton said about his longtime mentor. “He once said to me, years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, ‘I’m not going to stop until I drop. I’m going to die on the battlefield.’”
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Jackson got vaccinated and urged others to get the shot. He pointed out racial disparities in heath care and partnered with the National Medical Association, which represents Black physicians and patients, on a public health campaign to improve testing and treatment data and to recruit more African Americans to the medical field.
“It’s America’s unfinished business — we’re free, but not equal,” Jackson told The Associated Press in a 2020 interview. “There’s a reality check that has been brought by the coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.”
Seeking the spotlight and redefining what was possible
Jackson had his share of critics both within and outside the Black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek out the spotlight.
Jackson was widely known for his appearance in photographs taken moments after King was assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis hotel on April 4, 1968. For two days afterward, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with the venerated civil rights leader’s blood, including at a King memorial service where he told the Chicago City Council: “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King’s head.”
Two decades later, Jackson made history with his runs for the White House. Until Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Jackson was the most successful Black candidate for the U.S. presidency, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.
“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he told the AP in 2011. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”
Jackson’s cultural impact extended to the American lexicon on race and identity. In 1988, he was among a group of leaders to assert that Black people wanted to be called “African Americans,” establishing an identity that honored the population’s origins as well as their citizenship.
As the founder and leader of Operation PUSH, which later evolved into the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Jackson channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society. His high-profile diplomatic victories included the release of American civilians abroad during conflicts.
Pushing for change at an early age
Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. was born Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to Helen Burns, an unmarried high school student, and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.
Jackson played quarterback at Sterling High School in Greenville and accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois, but said he was told Black people couldn’t play quarterback. So he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, arriving just months after students there launched the sit-in movement to desegregate restaurants across the South. He became first-string quarterback, student body president, and an honor student in sociology and economics.
Jackson was soon leading demonstrations, and traveled to Alabama to meet King during the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. He was moving to Chicago to study theology, so King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference assigned him the task of launching Operation Breadbasket, a campaign to pressure companies to hire more Black workers.
He later called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work,” learning how to agitate within the law for social change.
The constant campaigns often left the college sweetheart he married in 1963, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, taking the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future congressmen, former Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., and Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson. A frequent houseguest was Santita’s friend Michelle Robinson, the future first lady.
Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned his Master of Divinity in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it means to be born out of wedlock and was supporting her emotionally and financially.
When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Jackson parted company in 1971, Jackson formed his own sweeping civil rights organization based in Chicago’s South Side, with a mission ranging from social services in communities of color to persuading corporate executives to hire more minorities. He formed the Rainbow Coalition after his first presidential run, then merged the political and social justice organizations into the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 1996.
While Jackson was known for his powerful voice, his words sometimes got him in trouble. In 1984, he apologized for calling New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to the city’s large Jewish population, in what he said he believed were private comments to a reporter.
And in July 2008, he made headlines when a hot mike caught him complaining that Obama was “talking down to Black people.” Still, tears streamed down his face when he joined the immense crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate Obama’s 2008 election victory.
“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (assassinated civil rights leader) Medgar Evers … could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
