Team USA's Jack Hughes scores in overtime to win gold against Canada.Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters
A lot of nice things happened for Canada at the Olympics in Milan Cortina. After watching the U.S.A. celebrate a second hockey gold at these Games on Sunday afternoon, it’s hard to remember any of them.
As Jack Hughes put the overtime winner by Jordan Binnington, all the good Milan memories dimmed and were replaced with the approximate 3,000 chances Canada had to win the game and didn’t.
Connor McDavid’s breakaway to nowhere in the second; same thing for Macklin Celebrini; Devon Toews, point blank, putting the puck into Connor Hellebuyck’s stick; a more than 90-second two-man advantage that came to nothing.
Most of all, Nathan MacKinnon, 10 minutes to go in the third, standing with the puck on his stick, at the side of a wide open net, with enough time to fill out a mortgage application and somehow missing.
Missed chances will haunt Canada after gold slips away in 2-1 overtime loss to U.S.
Canada was undone by itself, by the senselessness of three-on-three overtime and a goalie. Tucked into the American net like a turtle, Hellebuyck spent 60-plus minutes Carey Pricing Canada. So that’s what that feels like from the other side.
The one good thing you can say about the 2-1 stick in the heart was that it won’t become a referendum on the quality of Canadian hockey. It was a choppy game, lacking the rhythm of the quarter- and semi-finals, but Canada was the better team for most of it. On the day, they just weren’t the better finishers.
Connor McDavid watches Hughes celebrate his game-winning goal.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
That kind of sums up the entire Canadian Olympic effort. There were surprise golds (short-track speed skater Steven Dubois) and new stars (freestyler Megan Oldham), but for each of those, someone else in red and white wasn’t having the Games they’d hoped for.
Dubois’s teammate, William Dandjinou, won a silver medal and described his Games as “a disappointment.” That’s how spoiled we’ve become since Vancouver. We expect that anyone advertised as a star will show up and come straight off the top rope at the competition.
The final medal total – 5 golds, 7 silvers, 9 bronzes – put Canada 11th on the Olympic table, several spots under where they’d hoped to end up. All of a sudden, we’re getting pipped by Japan and Austria. Estimable nations, but we have more winter, and a lot more places to practise being good at it.
Nathan MacKinnon, after the loss.David W Cerny/Reuters
The emblematic performance was put in by the women’s hockey team. They weren’t favourites, but also they were, because this is the Olympics. Canada just shows up at these things. Over the course of a generation, we’d convinced ourselves that our Olympic team is like your carburetor. How does it do the things it does? No idea. It just does.
The women stumbled into the final after having been shoved back by the likes of Switzerland. You could feel the pedestal wobbling.
In the final, the Canada in Canada was back. They were going to win this thing over their only rivals. Right up until they didn’t.
It’s just one program and their fault was obvious – they stuck with a winning recipe so long that some of the ingredients curdled. An easy enough fix going forward. They have a whole league of these players to draw from and most of them are Canadian.
But that loss captured the sense that the Olympics has begun to slip our grasp. We had it there for a good 20 years. We’d become automatic. We aren’t automatic any more. We’re manual, and if you miss a shift, you fall off the pace.
Sam Bennett and Hughes collide during the third period.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The final weekend was the last chance to put a happy face on everything. Win at least one curling gold (check) and then win at men’s hockey. That would convince most people that we’d had a great outing.
The day started poorly, with the typical Canadian Olympic Committee triumphal lap replaced by dire warnings that the whole thing is about to fall apart. No more money means no more world-class sports programs means more crummy Olympics to come. Milan was the warning.
However, they don’t give out medals for press conferences (though they should). If Milan wasn’t going to be the sort of Olympics you remember your whole life, there was still the possibility of one perfect hockey game to wrap it up.
The U.S. did us the favour of setting up the last act Canada required. That’s where their co-operation ended.
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What you’re left with isn’t bitterness. You can’t be bitter about the Olympics. It’s too much fun for that, and most of these people are going broke putting on a show for us. To criticize them for failing isn’t just churlish. It’s un-Canadian.
Dandjinou had it right – the feeling is disappointment. Not in them, or not entirely in them. The men’s hockey team was built to ruin. In what could have been an epochal victory over the team we collectively dislike most, they didn’t meet their standard. Worse things have happened, but not as recently as today.
The disappointment is in the lack of a feeling. Remember how the Olympics used to feel 10, 15 years ago? Like we were rocking into the world’s biggest kegger, whooping like maniacs and holding two 40s of Jack over our heads. We weren’t at the party. We were the party.
Now we’re just at the party again.
Hughes and teammate Clayton Keller receive their gold medals.Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
The smart play is to savour the defeat, all of it. If you really felt it on Sunday after Jack Hughes started dancing around, good. In order to make future wins feel big, current losses have to be the same way. Sunday’s was a beauty in that regard. Like a real punch in the wherever you’d most prefer not to be punched.
Watching Matthew Tkachuk, draped in a U.S. flag like a hillbilly George Washington, skating around in the front of his team trying to pose for the most memeable photo … Canadian broadcasters don’t need to do any advertising for the next Winter Games. Just show that clip again.
Sunday wasn’t the hockey game Canada wanted, and Milan wasn’t the Games it wanted. That means it’s now time to figure out how a carburetor works.
L.A. 2028 begins in 873 days. Based on what we’ve seen over the past two weeks, we’re already behind.
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