In fact, the number didn’t even mean that much to its owner, Chelsey Junker.

“I said, ‘Well, Chelsey, what number do you want to be here?’ She says, ‘Eh, I don’t care,’” ML-B-O girls coach Tim Snyder explained.

Junker ended up with No. 25 because Snyder thought it was Junker’s number as a freshman. Neither could remember for sure.

“That was just kind of Chelsey, just go with the flow,” Snyder says. “It could’ve said ‘78’ on it, and if that was the only one, she might’ve said, ‘Eh, OK, I’ll take that one, too.’”

Junker didn’t see much varsity action this year, playing mostly on the B-squad. But after the events of Jan. 22 and the weeks that have followed, the number has taken on a new meaning.

“The No. 25 now has big significance,” Snyder says.

Whatever else happened on Jan. 22, the day will be remembered in Mountain Lake and Butterfield as the day of Junker’s accident.

Snowmobiling with a group of friends for the first time all winter, the Mountain Lake High School sophomore was thrown off her snowmobile and into a fencepost.

Since then, Chelsey Junker has been in a coma, her life on hold. With it are the lives of her parents, her friends, her family and two communities.

By all accounts, Chelsey Junker is the girl next door who is everyone’s friend.

Listening to her fellow sophomores talk about her, it’s easy to relate their stories to the smiling girl in Chelsey’s favorite picture of herself.

“She’s a good girl,” said Butterfield’s Emily Harrington, another sophomore on the basketball team. “She’s the life of the party. When you were down, she’d tell you stories just to make you laugh, or do something stupid.”

And down days don’t seem to exist for Chelsey, either.

“She’s really outgoing, bubbly. She’s always happy,” Lynsey Haglund explained. “There’s not a day that you see her and that she’s down or anything.”

In fact, in talking to her friends, there seem to be so many moments and so many little stories — some revolving around Chelsey’s driving skills, others about her love for Chinese food — that settling on one story is impossible.

“There’s too many,” Haglund says. “Chelsey’s just that way. She’s too funny.”

Everything changed — for Chelsey, her friends, her family and her “other” family, the ML-B-O girls basketball team — on Jan. 22.

A day after a snowstorm wiped out a Friday basketball game, Chelsey was in Butterfield with her cousin, Alison Buhler, another sophomore on the basketball team.

When Chelsey and Alison woke up and saw the snow outside — the first really significant snow of the winter — the plans to go snowmobiling were easily hatched.

“She called up her dad and said, ‘Dad I want to go snowmobiling. Can I go snowmobiling?’” Buhler recalls. “And her dad said, ‘Oh, I suppose.’”

Chelsey, Alison and a group of friends went out around 2 p.m. An hour and a quarter later, after a short break to figure out how long the group wanted to keep riding, the accident happened.

Alison and everyone involved said the group was going slow — in fact, that the group hadn’t even gotten back up to speed after stopping for the break. Junker hit a patch of ice, skidded, and then hit a bare spot of grass.

She was thrown off the snowmobile and toward a fencepost.

“I saw the snowmobile roll, and then I saw Chelsey lying on the ground,” Alison recalled. “You expect her to get up and go, ‘Haha, look what I did.’ She never moved.

“Nobody really knew how bad (she was hurt).”

Mountain Lake and Butterfield are small, closely knit communities. Although the towns are about seven miles apart, everyone seems to know everyone — and everyone seems to care.

The first to respond to the accident scene, after being summoned by a few of the teen-agers, was Phil Buhler — Alison’s father and also the Butterfield fire chief.

Buhler knew immediately that Chelsey had a head injury, and rode with her in the ambulance from Butterfield to St. James — all too aware of how close his family and Junker’s are.

“It could’ve been my daughter,” he said. “And Chelsey’s practically like a daughter to my wife and I. She and Alison have been best friends since they were babies.”

Junker was sent almost immediately to Mankato, where she underwent surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain. Eventually, she would be diagnosed with a fracture in her neck and lower spine, broken ribs, a punctured lung and, of course, the severe head injury.

That first night, family wasat the hospital.

The next evening, the true extent of the caring became evident. More than 100 people showed up to lend support to Rod and Bonnie Junker, Chelsey’s parents.

Rod made a video of Chelsey in her hospital room, and showed it to the gathered group outside since visitors were limited to immediate family.

“The kids came to see Chelsey,” Rod recalled. “They didn’t come to see us.”

After the video was shown, the basketball team made a circle, joined hands, and said a prayer.

“That was just so cool, to see that the kids’ faith was that strong that they’d be willing to do that in public for Chelsey,” Phil Buhler said.

Snyder had to deal with the situation immediately — both as a person and as a coach.

He found out at the ML-B-O boys game Saturday night, when team captain Naomi Winters called to say she had an update on Chelsey.

“I said, ‘Chelsey? Chelsey was in an accident?’” Snyder remembered. “We just kind of sat there, stunned.”

He remembers now covering situations like catastrophic injury while studying coaching in college.

“You sit there as a student going, ‘I hope this never happens to me as a coach,’” he said. “The textbooks and the talks don’t prepare you for what it’s really like.”

After discussing things Sunday and Monday, Snyder instinctively knew his team wouldn’t be ready to play St. James on Tuesday of that week.

His squad agreed. But when it came to discussing the idea of playing any of the games on the rest of the schedule, Snyder saw a clear resolve in his squad.

“Everybody said, ‘Chelsey would want us to keep going on,’” Snyder explained.

Going forward wasn’t easy. It’s still not easy. The Wolverines went through the rest of the season trying to find some sort of emotional balance between “OK” and “surviving” — both on the court and off.

Practices were cut short, and were almost non-existent in the week after Junker’s accident. Due to the canceling of the St. James game, ML-B-O had to play five games in seven days.

The group spent most of its time going through offensive sets and shooting drills, with practices often lasting far less than the normal two hours.

“We try to have a little bit more fun,” Snyder said. “We kind of loosened up a little bit.”

But when the group took the court for that first game — with the No. 25 on their uniforms and Chelsey’s uniform and water bottle on an empty chair — Snyder saw the reality of many things sink in with his team.

“Everybody was kind of looking toward each other like, ‘This is our first step towards getting back.’”

The Mountain Lake-Butterfield-Odin girls basketball team ended its season with a first-round playoff loss to Edgerton. Since then, the girls have gone on to other things.

Some have gone to softball; some haven’t. Snyder said Alison Buhler decided not to play a spring sport and is undecided on a return to basketball.

To all, the accident remains close. Snyder remembers what he told his team after the playoff loss to Edgerton.

“A lot of little things got put into place,” he said. “As we said the other night, ‘Chelsey’s going to be with you for the rest of your careers, the rest of your lives, the rest of everything.’”

It remains a part of everyday life. Chelsey was transferred to Rochester’s St. Marys Hospital Feb. 2, and since then, both Snyder and Phil Buhler have seen an improvement in every day life.

Instead of relying on visiting the hospital, which in Mankato was less than an hour away, many students are checking out www.caringbridge.org, where Chelsey is listed under “Minnesota” and her last name.

“It’s just been a daily kind of thing of, ‘Where are we at?’” Snyder said.

Phil Buhler added that everyone needed “to get back into doing things (they’re) supposed to do.

“For Alison, too, it was good to get back to something more normal,” he added.

Rod and Bonnie Junker are almost never alone in Rochester. Most days afford several visitors, and weekends see much of the immediate family — including Chelsey’s brother and sister — returning home.

But almost two months later, Chelsey remains in a coma. While she responds to some verbal commands, the doctors have said she needs to show consistent response to be admitted to the rehabilitation program.

Rod Junker said the support has been amazing, and asks simply in prayer for God to “give us strength for one more day.”

“That we might see her eyes, and get our Chelsey back,” he said. “It’s been (two months), and we miss her.”