The unofficial national anthem of Canada - the bellicose nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah, hey hey, goodbye - first rang out at the GM Insane Asylum with 2:43 left in the third period.
Minutes later, the Russians raised their sticks to the roof in a classy salute and left the building, their Olympics over. Team Canada did the same, and the great building shuddered again.
For the first time in 50 years, a Canadian hockey team beat a Russian one at a Winter Olympics, another historic first for these crazy Vancouver Games, off to such a rocky start it seems an eternity ago, and now officially a roaring success.
Team Canada crushed the vaunted Russians, picked as the gold-medal favourite by many, in almost every way. The anticipated Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin matchup never materialized, but at least Crosby showed up; as one of my friends texted me after the first period, "Is Ovechkin playing?" He was almost that invisible.
The Canadian goalie, Roberto Luongo of the Vancouver Canucks, was greeted with hometown cries of "Louuuuuuuuuuuuu" every time he touched the puck, which was frankly, infrequently. The Canadian defence, maligned as slumbering, awoke, and crabbily too.
Ryan Getzlaf, for whom Team Canada general manager Steve Yzerman had patiently held a spot, waiting for Getzlaf's injured ankle to heal, played brilliantly, scoring the first goal and picking up two assists with his ridiculously soft-handed playmaking.
It was almost a half-century ago to the day - Feb. 28 - that a group of Canadians from the Kitchener-Waterloo Dutchmen delivered an 8-5 shellacking to the Russians. Last night's score was almost a replica, 7-3, and players and fans both can be forgiven for being a little greedy.
Then - so far away and long ago - the Games were held to a little pissant town called Squaw Valley, Calif., which at the time it was awarded the Winter Olympics had no mayor, one ski resort with a single chairlift and two rope tows, and one 50-room lodge.
It was the first time the Olympics were televised, inconceivable, because television now rules the show.
Dwight Eisenhower was the President of the United States, and the Vietnam War was just getting properly started and didn't resemble the morass it would become. Chubby Checker's The Twist was among the top hits that year. John Diefenbaker was the Canadian prime minister, and the Canadian flag was still the Red Ensign, though Lester Pearson, elected three years later, would soon change that.
The Maple Leaf, so evident at the hockey game last night, with people waving it, wearing it, and with so many people dressed alike, and in red, that as Andrew Coyne of Macleans magazine noted it was almost Maoist in uniformity, was formally inaugurated on Feb. 15, 1965, five years after Squaw Valley.
At the time, the speaker of the Senate, one Maurice Bourget, said, "The flag is the symbol of the nations unity, for it, beyond any doubt, represents all the citizens of Canada without distinction of race, language, belief or opinion."
And so it does, and did last night.
Canada has won so many gold medals, and has so many endearing and decent champions that it was possible for a while to imagine that hockey mattered less, or might matter less. Even last night, Clara Hughes' face on the big screen scoreboard, ending her Olympic career with another bronze medal, evoked wild applause, while ice-dance champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, there in the flesh, had people leaping to their feet - at a hockey game, for heaven's sakes.
But nothing matters, still, like the national game.
In the playing of it, and in the watching, Canadians shed the genteel reserve for which we are rightly known (you can't count the number of stories in the international press about the national penchant for apology, for instance) and are loud, hard, unapologetic and even profane (in the last minutes of the game, as the camera found Chris Pronger, he was telling a Russian, "Oh fuck off").
Not everyone ice dances; not every one can hurtle down a bobsled run, as the Canadian women did last night at Whistler, and finish one-two. But in every family, there is someone who plays hockey, who actually knows the game. It is embedded in the country's DNA, born in a million early morning runs to Tim Horton's, in thousands of small rinks. I was able to stand throughout most of the game last night, just as I used to at the Noranda Recreation Centre, just as the fathers always do. There's nothing like the good old hockey game, after all.
Everything in the world has changed since 1960 - everything and nothing.