Canadian players, including captain Marie-Philip Poulin (right), take in their overtime loss to the U.S. in the gold medal women's hockey game on Thursday in Milan.NATHAN DENETTE/The Canadian Press
It is ridiculous to suggest that one team of professionals could or would rope-a-dope another for an entire year.
It’s not that it’s not doable. It’s that it would require an impossible level of foresight. How could one club know that the other team would be the one they’d end up playing for all the marbles? How could one game matter so much that it would justify even attempting such a ruse?
It is ridiculous everywhere, except in women’s hockey, where Canada knows to a certainty who they will be playing in the only game that matters to them.
How else would you explain the Canada that played the U.S.A. a week ago and was absolutely run over, and the one that showed up on Thursday night?
How would you explain how they bullied the Americans, albeit briefly, in the Olympic final, while losing to them 24-7 on aggregate in November’s Rivalry Series?
Canada loses overtime heartbreaker to U.S. in women's gold medal hockey final
There are two ways of looking at Canada vs. USA Hockey Gold Vol. VIII – as another overtime toss-up, or as the grandest game of long-term strategy ever played in elite team sport. Option 2 is more fun.
After they’d lost 2-1, the Canadians weren’t exactly in a fun mood. Most of them came through the mixed zone in tears, though not angry ones like there had been in Pyeongchang.
Nobody refused their silver medal. A few Canadians even deigned to touch it.
“Probably the toughest loss of my career,” veteran Erin Ambrose said. That captured the flavour.
Kristin O'Neill gave Canada the 1-0 lead it held until the dying moments of regulation.David W Cerny/Reuters
“Every time we play them, it’s a tight, tight game,” said defender Renata Fast, who played the minutes equivalent of two work nights on Thursday.
That hasn’t been true for a while, but it must be the thing they’d clung to.
Is there anybody more devastated on live television than whichever one of these teams ends up with the silver medal at the Games? That’s the medal ceremony only a winner can bear to watch. No. 1 in paroxysms of joy, No. 2 in desolation, No. 3 trying not to attract attention.
The poor Swiss – bronze medalists after their own overtime game – were fairly bursting with joy, and unable to indulge it.
If there’s any solace to be found here, it’s in the fact that the effort was heroic, and only the result wasn’t.
Canada's women's hockey coach knows a thing or two about an unlikely win
No neutral will look back at this game as a high-water mark for the sport.
Canada started strong, scored a short-handed goal and then got hung off the front of America’s truck grill for the last hour. It felt even longer.
The third period viewed like an endless penalty kill. The only respite was a single Canadian power play, where everyone in red took a couple of minutes to sleep on their feet.
Still, Canada was 124 seconds from doing it. That’s how much time was left in the game when the U.S. tied it through Hilary Knight. Great goal. No one to blame for it. That’s the best case of that scenario.
In overtime, though dead on their skates, Canada had one great chance to end it through Sarah Fillier. It didn’t work out. Again, more of a save than a miss.
A couple of minutes later, Megan Keller scored the winner. At least that was a great goal as well.
The big takeaway from this one was its uniqueness.
Over a hundred years, Canada has won and lost at hockey in every conceivable fashion – come from behind, lose from ahead, improbable momentum shifts. We once recreated our game on the fly in order to take a big tournament. Our history in the game is too big to be made or undone by any particular result.
But this was a new one. This was our national Rumble in the Jungle.
Over more than a calendar year leading into the Olympics, Canada played the role of Muhammad Ali, leaning back and accepting shots in tournaments and rounds that didn’t matter. Rosters get juggled, and losses happen, but Canada going down 10-4? That’s not normal.
The U.S. was George Foreman, full of confidence, decisively winning battles no one will remember now. It all came down to this final round.
In this version, Mr. Foreman won.
In the fullness of time, Canada may be able to admit that mistakes were made. They called this group “experienced.” What they were was old. The deeper Thursday’s final got, the clearer that became.
By midway through the second period, Canadian players could be seen on the bench with their heads down, sucking wind. By the third, they could just barely get their eyes off the ice three feet in front of them.
If they’d won it, it would have been remembered as a glorious retreat, rather than any sort of attack.
There’s a lesson in this somewhere. Something about past victories being no predictor of future ones. Ten years ago, you could count on one generation to get you through three, maybe four, Olympic cycles. That’s over now. You need overlapping generations to do this right. The American team had that.
So losing this one – their third reversal in eight tries – is a disappointment, but not a surprise.
A new generation of Canadians will take on this mantle at the next Olympics. We don’t know who will lead them, but we already know their mission – revenge.
That worked in Beijing. Maybe it will work again in the French Alps. At the least, it keeps people interested in the chase.
As much as we might think so, nobody’s that interested in a team that never loses. They just don’t want one that loses badly. At the crucial moment, this Canadian team saved its reputation in that regard.
If it’s to have any legacy, Thursday’s effort begs a question of all of us who didn’t play in it.
If our hockey team can play a game this long against our biggest rivals and come so close, what are the rest of us capable of in the border skirmishes to come? What’s our plan, and how do we win it?
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