CHICAGO — Allie Quigley never meant to end her career with an Irish goodbye.

The longtime Chicago Sky star jokingly acknowledged her quiet exit in a Players Tribune column on Tuesday as she formally announced her retirement from the WNBA — nearly three years after playing her final game for the Sky in September 2022.

Quigley left the game as one of the sharpest shooters in the history of women’s basketball, winning four 3-point contests at WNBA All-Star weekend. She remains the Sky’s leading 3-point scorer after making 504 baskets behind the arc while shooting 39.5% across her career with the franchise.

For a decade, the Sky were defined by one dynamic partnership: Quigley and her wife, Courtney Vandersloot. The pair of guards shared a car on the way from the airport to Sky training camp in 2013, an introduction that sparked one of the strongest connections in the WNBA on and off the court. Over the next decade, the pair married, recruited top talent to Chicago and established a legacy as they led the Sky to their first-ever WNBA title.

Playing for the Sky always meant something more for Quigley, who grew up in Joliet and played four years at DePaul. That commitment to her hometown team was a foundational piece of the Sky’s success throughout otherwise challenging seasons that defined the first half of her career.

“The main thing was that people wanted to play the style that we play,” Quigley told the Tribune in 2022. “It wasn’t ‘Oh, I want to come to Chicago for their gym or to live in the city.’ They want to play our style of basketball and that superseded everything. That’s something we definitely take pride in.”

Quigley initially felt ready to retire after winning the title in 2021, but she decided to play one final season. After quietly stepping away from the game in 2022, she turned her focus to her next priority: having a baby.

Although the couple had been ready to start a family after their wedding in 2018, Quigley wrote that they felt inhibited by the grueling cycle of playing overseas in the offseason and the respective arcs of their careers with the Sky. But Quigley was still hopeful that if her first pregnancy was quick and successful, she might be able to return and play one more year.

The process took longer than expected. Two more WNBA seasons stretched past. And Quigley wrote that the birth of her daughter Jana in April confirmed her readiness to say goodbye to professional basketball for good.

“I know I speak for both myself and Courtney when I tell you that as special as the Sky winning a championship felt, and as proud of a moment as that was, bringing a baby into the world is our accomplishment we’re most proud of,” Quigley wrote in The Players Tribune. “It was the greatest day of our lives. There’s nothing like it. But also, now that Jana is here, I feel ready to finally and officially say goodbye to my basketball career.”

Quigley’s announcement is somewhat bittersweet, coming less than 24 hours after Vandersloot suffered a season-ending ACL injury in Saturday’s loss to the Indiana Fever at the United Center. Captaining the Sky once again, Vandersloot’s return was key for the team’s development after a tumultuous 2024 season.

But the legacy forged by Vandersloot and Quigley in Chicago is untouchable. The pair will be in the franchise’s history books for years — if not decades — to come as the first and second all-time leaders in points, assists and games played.

Now, all that’s left is another jersey to be hung in the rafters at Wintrust Arena, where Quigley is already memorialized in the DePaul Hall of Fame.

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