Jane Ziergiebel stepped foot on a field hockey pitch six weeks ago and started "look(ing) like a kid who found the path she's going to be on for the rest of her life," John Ziergiebel said yesterday.

The father had met his daughter, a Gloucester High School graduate and former field hockey player, in Marblehead to watch the visiting Fishermen play. After the game, Jane Ziergiebel walked up to Kim Patience, Gloucester's athletic director and field hockey coach, and said she thought the girls' defense needed some work.

"And Kim said, 'Yep, and you're the girl to do it,'" said John Ziergiebel, the former Gloucester High assistant principal and current principal at Marblehead High School.

With that, Jane Ziergiebel began volunteering with the field hockey team, and soon after as a tutor at Marblehead High for students from the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, kids bused up from Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury to go to school in Marblehead

She was beginning to think her path might lead her into teaching, following the footsteps of both her parents.

But that path was tragically cut short early Saturday morning when her car crashed into the median on the Massachusetts Turnpike. She was 23.

Jane Ziergiebel was declared dead at the scene. Her 1990 Mazda Miata hit the guardrail on the left hand side of the highway and spun into the median, said Lt. Eric Anderson of the State Police Office of Media Relations.

The crash happened just before Exit 8 in Palmer as she was driving west at 12:55 a.m. Ziergiebel, the car's only occupant, was not wearing her seat belt, Anderson said. Conditions Friday night and early Saturday morning were rainy across the state. State police are still investigating the cause of the accident.

John and Ann Ziergiebel, who now live in Marblehead, said police arrived at their house at 5:30 a.m. Saturday with the news.

They returned to their Riverdale home to be with their other three children - Molly, 27, Andy, 25 and Samuel, 20 - and gather strength with the help of their neighbors.

"Our Riverdale community is like nothing else," said Ann Ziergiebel, who teaches eighth-grade social studies at O'Maley Middle School. "We have three generations of people here who knew Jane. We're sharing stories. We're laughing, we're crying, and laughing and crying again as we tell stories."

Ann Ziergiebel is using the strong community bonds, her family and her memories of Jane for support; John Ziergiebel said he called a friend who had lost two husbands and two children for advice in coping.

"We are completely unbalanced right now," Ann Ziergiebel said. "We are completely off course because of her loss. But she will guide us. That's what will get us through."

While remembering stories of his daughter, though, John Ziergiebel is second-guessing himself, first about Jane's Volvo, sitting in Gloucester with engine troubles, and about a repair job he did on her seat-belt buckle.

"Last spring I got her a Volvo, which is a tank," he said. "It developed engine problems and she didn't have the money to get it fixed. She was a young kid without a car, so I gave her my Miata."

John Ziergiebel said his daughter had "several false starts" in life, but would immediately and honestly take stock and pick herself up.

"She laid it on the table, say 'Look at what a mess I've made,' and start again," said John Ziergiebel. "Like Andy just said, she was everybody's favorite. It was that she would tell it like it is."

After reassessing her path as a biology major at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, her father said Jane, who needed one more class for her diploma and planned to take it next semester, took time off to find herself. Her parents urged her to volunteer.

"I think the great strength of Jane that will guide us every minute of every day for the rest of our lives is that she was never judgmental," Ann Ziergiebel said. "She had a fierce sense of justice and really was driven to right every wrong and create a balance."

The field hockey game in Marblehead last month was the first step on a new path, and John Ziergiebel said Patience gave Jane Ziergiebel more and more responsibility, "and she just ran with it."

Recently she started tutoring students - "She took off with it," he said - at Marblehead and John Ziergiebel remembers being with her for a week, watching her realize she might want to be a teacher.

"I had a week with this girl, who was a success," John Ziergiebel said. "And I'll keep playing that over and over again for the rest of my life. I'll see her every day."