Masters of Curling: Val Sweeting caps an improbable week, while Brad Gushue cools out Mike McEwen

You get  thirty of the best curling teams in the world together and jam them into a half week of, basically, must-win situations, and you get some pretty intriguing drama.

The Masters - the first Grand Slam event of the 2014-15 season - provided plenty of storylines, including that of a surprise women's winner as well as the game's juggernaut men's team finally being tamed.

With Alberta's Val Sweeting defeating Sweden's Margaretha Sigfridsson, 5-4, for the first Grand Slam win of her career, the surprise element of the tournament was in place.

Brad Gushue's 8-6 victory over Mike McEwen provided the giant-slaying.

McEwen's foursome had been hot enough to break down pebble merely be showing up, bringing a 28-1 won/loss record into The Masters. That was fairly incredible, considering his was a team that struggled much of the last two years and very nearly didn't exist this season.

(You can read all about Team McEwen's near demise and incredible turnaround here)

One team against which McEwen did not struggle, was Gushue's. He'd won 9 of his previous 10 against the 2006 Olympic gold medal skip but was denied when Gushue ran McEwen out of rocks with a double in the final end.

That it was a close finish was a surprise, considering Gushue had cracked a four in the fifth end and forged a big, 6-2 lead.

That was when McEwen's hot hand appeared, again, to completely change the complexion of the match. An incredible double raise, double take out for four, in the sixth, had to have Gushue wondering if the locomotive from Manitoba just could not be stopped. Stopped it was, however, with McEwen's 3rd loss of the season, against 33 wins.

The five-rock rule certainly shone brightly in this event, leading to a multitude of cluttered ends, comeback opportunities and fascinating shotmaking. If this keeps up, it most certainly will become standard operating procedure in all games; from local clubs to the Olympics.

There's a difference in Gushue's team this season and that is the re-addition of Mark Nichols, who helped win that Olympic gold medal as a front ender. The 34 year old is back on the team from Newfoundland and Labrador and now plays vice. This result will have plenty wondering if the magic between the two has returned. Gushue certainly hopes so, as he continues to chase the one big prize that has eluded him - a Brier championship.

SWEETING'S WIN A SURPRISE

Sweeting, who came into the week on the heels of some tumult, must be over the moon with the result. After Joanne Courtney left her team at the end of last season to join Rachel Homan, Sweeting added New Brunswick's Andrea Crawford for this year. However, Crawford abruptly left the team on the eve of this event.

While Lori Olson-Johns has signed on to play vice for the rest of the season, she was not a part of the Sweeting victory at the Masters. Instead, Cathy Overton-Clapham - who hasn't been curling regularly this season - jumped in to throw third stones, with Sweeting mainstays Rachelle Brown and Dana Ferguson in their usual front end spots. With that as a backdrop, you'd have been hard-pressed to find someone to choose Sweeting's crew to win in a field strewn with curling mines known as Jennifer Jones, Eve Muirhead, reigning World Champion Binia Feltscher and Homan.

Sweeting emerged, nationally, at last year's Olympic Trials, giving top competition all they could handle early in the week, before fading out of the playoff picture. She and her teammates continued their emergence by dominating at Alberta Provincials and then dropping the championship game at The Scotties, to Homan.

Courtney was a big piece of that puzzle, perhaps the best sweeper in the women's game (Brown is also one of the game's top sweepers). It remains to be seen just how Olson-Johns will fit in and now we'll never know how the back end duo of Sweeting and Crawford (a seven time New Brunswick champ) would've worked out.

No matter. With Sweeting at skip, the sky seems to be the limit for this team, as the 27 year-old has consistently shown the ability to load the pressure of a big game onto her shoulders and reply with clutch shooting. She did it again with the final shot of the championship game, playing a difficult tap on a Sigfridsson stone on the button. That after a nervous final end had built into a tricky situation that called for the skip to make a couple of pistols to salt away the win.

Three winners at The Masters; Sweeting, Gushue and curling fans, who were treated to the beauty of the five-rock rule in all its glory.