Team USA’s Gold Is Sweeter For The Struggle

The members of the U.S. women's Olympic hockey team may not admit to this, but they needed to have the pants scared off them by Canada to give the whole gold medal exercise some badly needed historical context. They needed Hilary Knight's reaper-cheating goal with 2:04 left in regulation to tie the game 1-1 and relocate their binary rivalry with our northern brethren and sistren, and they especially needed Megan Keller's ultra-crafty game-winning goal in overtime to make it all stick—not just for the postgame pictures, but for the rest of their lives.

But that's the thing about America's relationship with the Winter Olympics. It is not just a hinder-kicking medal exercise like the Summer Games, because there are too many events at which the U.S. simply is not pre-eminent, or even minimally eminent. Skimo, for example, a new event that dared to ask the question "Why not ski up the mountain?", was designed specifically for Europeans who can't get to work by bus. For the U.S., the tensest Winter Olympic moments matter because the margins of victory are simply not sufficiently wide or sufficiently plentiful to allow for much in the way of jingoistic preening. Genuine drama substitutes for the usual heady mix of arrogance and dominance. And drama was the only aspect of the task at which the American women's hockey side had been particularly poor.

They boatraced the field for the first six of their seven games by a combined score of 31-1, with the lone opposition goal scored by Czechia forward and future trivia answer Barbora Jurickova in the U.S.'s introductory 5-1 win. The American women outshot the Czechs, Finns, Swiss, Canadians (who were missing their best player Marie-Philip Poulin at the time), Italians, and Swedes by a combined 259-95. The games were masterful but clinical, almost too cold to the touch, and decidedly unmemorable. The gold medal they seemed headed for would be deserved, but also too easy to stick in anyone's memory.

But the Canadians with Poulin really are the team everyone said they were, and even though she was not a material contributor on Thursday, the rest of the team was a much better match for the U.S. than they had been earlier in the tournament. The result was the showdown that this tournament was desperate to have, and had mostly gone without into the medal games. Canada found its legs and doggedness, and was very slightly the better team through much of the first two and a half periods; they led long enough to be able to taste as well as feel the gold medals. This made the late-game and overtime turns particularly delicious, although it is a testament to an often inartistic but persistently tense championship game that it all would have been just as tasty if the Canadians had won.

It took Knight, who found a small unpopulated space to the left of Canadian goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens and redirected a slapper from just inside the line by Laila Edwards with 2:04 left, to give the two countries the extra time the game deserved. Keller's deceptive dance around Canadian defenseman Claire Thompson brought that overtime to an end, and made a moment that will linger for every Olympic pregame show for the next 40 years or so.

It is admittedly a silly way to measure success in a sport that gives gaudy hubcap-sized medals to each winner for bragging rights and advertising purposes, but either team winning 5-0 would have been decidedly worse. The U.S. and Canada have owned women's hockey since the first Olympic tournament 28 years ago, and the only thing worse than the same two teams playing for gold all the time is one of them schooling the other in the re-re-re-re-re-re-rematch. These are the giants in a sport that is still struggling to become internationally significant beyond San Diego or Newfoundland, and if the U.S. and Canada are going to remain the only teams capable of fighting for the throne, that game of musical chairs might as well be a legitimate battle between equals. High-stakes hockey is a masochistic thing, so it would have been more fun for us all if the overtime had lasted longer to allow the tension to rise from unsettling to properly tortuous; a high school girls game in Minnesota lasted 12 overtimes and three days this past week, to give you an idea of what we're after here. But it would only incrementally have been an improvement. In a game with this little slack in it, it's tough to find much in the way of edits.

Mostly, the final served as a reminder that shield still sharpens sword, and that with all respect to the Swiss, who won bronze for just the second time by beating Sweden, 2-1, also in bonus shinny, the U.S. and Canada still are the ones who wield those tools most effectively. In an Olympics that will be remembered most notably for its hilarious quirks—it is indisputably a landmark for the relatively new sport of public self-flogging for infidelity—Thursday's final was the Games stripped to their frill-free bedrock. Here was a story with no sidebars, a rivalry between equals and kindred spirits who only recently started fixating on manufactured differences. It was two teams of women who get the whole idea that box scores come and go but mutual excellence can be forever, playing in a way that both reflected and honored that truth.