In no realm of culture does cliché reign supreme more than sports. With two teams, one winner, one set of rules, and the thinnest of margins for contingency, truisms have good odds of simply becoming truths. Cliches become facts, then they become legends. Perhaps no sporting cliches are more legendary than those emanating from the “Miracle on Ice,” when a team of all-American college boys defeated the four-time defending champion Soviet Union for the gold medal in ice hockey at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. In the waning seconds of the game, as the Americans clung to a 4–3 lead, telecaster Al Michaels counted down and, at five, asked and answered his own question: “Do you believe in miracles? YES!” Memorialized ad nauseam—films alone include 1981’s Miracle on Ice, 2001’s Do You Believe in Miracles?, 2004’s Miracle, 2015’s Of Miracles And Men, and this year’s Miracle: The Boys of ’80—that game has fueled two and a half generations of coaches’ pep talks, trivia pulls, and canned nuggets of broadcast wisdom. It should therefore be no surprise to find the claw marks of the “Miracle” all over the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics, where the US took gold in men’s hockey for the first time in forty-six years. The slain Goliath once again wore red, hailed from the north, and represented a country increasingly at odds with the American government, but it was the maple leaf rather than the hammer and sickle whose loss inspired President Trump to fete the men’s team at the State of the Union earlier this week.
That Team USA, composed entirely of NHL superstars at the peak of their careers, was undoubtedly the best American roster ever iced hardly mattered. 1980 was invoked shamelessly: Doubters of General Manager Bill Guerin’s decision to leave two of the three leading American goal scorers at home were pointed to Herb Brooks’s apocryphal line about bringing the “right” players, not the best ones; the cameras cut relentlessly to center Brock Nelson’s uncle Dave Christian, a member of the 1980 squad, sitting in the audience (Nelson’s grandfather, we were reminded, also won gold in 1960). Even the jerseys were pointedly nostalgic, replacing the swooshing typographies of the Obama era with vintage diagonal block lettering. The midcentury throwbacks offered a favorable contrast to the Canadian jerseys (or sweaters, as they say north of the border) whose blacked-out maple leaf, reminiscent of the Volcom logo or an artsy Kevlar vest, suggested a harder, new edge being projected by our neighbors to the north.
And hard they were. As good as this American team was, the Canadians were even better, probably the best single hockey team ever assembled, with the possible exception of the 2014 Canadian Olympic team. Canada outshot the US 42–28 and tied the game after giving up an early lead, but it wasn’t enough. In sudden-death overtime, the US defenseman Zach Werenski beat Canada’s Nathan MacKinnon off the puck and made a beautiful pass to a newly toothless Jack Hughes, who had been sticked in the face minutes before, and who put the golden goal past Jordan Binnington. Canada came into the tournament with a gold-or-nothing mentality, and their crestfallen faces during the medal handout showed it (to say nothing of the humiliating parting gift to each player of a plushie weasel named Tina, the Olympic mascot). The Americans, for their part, are deservedly proud of the 2–1 win: It was hardly improbable, but that doesn’t mean it was likely.
But—and now your author must regrettably invoke the greatest cliché of all—the real winners weren’t even on the ice: They were the hockey- and Olympics-watching public. The return of NHL players to the Winter Olympics after twelve long years was nothing short of a triumph, a dazzling display of the world’s strangest sport at the highest level and on the biggest stage.
A crucial element of the “Miracle” mythos is Olympic amateurism. Until 1988, professional athletes were barred from the Olympics, a condition of eligibility exploited by the Soviet bloc, whose superhuman students, workers, and soldiers spent a suspicious amount of time—nearly all their labor time—training on state payroll. While this account is a little disingenuous, failing to account for the semi- and preprofessional nature of college and youth sports in North America, it does largely explain decades of Soviet and Czechoslovak hockey primacy, and the concomitant Canadian boycott of Olympic hockey. It would take another decade for the NHL to hash out it with the IOC, and so the best professional hockey players in the world didn’t debut at the Winter Olympics until 1998. Despite a surprise Czech win in Nagano, Canada quickly reasserted its international dominance, taking gold in 2002, 2010, and 2014. By the mid-2010s it was clear once again who the top dog was.
But then things fell apart again. In 2017, with franchise owners increasingly unwilling to modify the season schedule, cover player insurance, and risk losing stars to injuries, the NHL pulled out of the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. They would sit out the 2022 Beijing Olympics too, arguing that they couldn’t afford a lengthy and disruptive mid-season break so soon after the pandemic. While the renewed absence of NHLers radically leveled the playing field—a chronically disappointing Russian team, rebranded as Olympic Athletes from Russia in the wake of the doping scandal, won in 2018, and perennial bronze bridesmaid Finland took home the gold in 2022—it also diminished the quality of play. The tournament become more like the IIHF World Championships, a hybrid development camp and showcase for top prospects and has-beens playing in Europe. Most meaningfully, North American fans just kind of stopped watching Olympic hockey.
When the announcement came that the NHL would be back for Milan Cortina 2026, a condition strenuously demanded by the players in the league’s latest collective bargaining agreement, it was greeted with excitement, but also skepticism. The trepidation grew with each new story about the Italian organizers’ staggering incompetence. In North America, hockey is played on a 200 x 85-feet rink; in Europe, rinks are a few feet shorter and nearly ten feet wider, favoring a more skilled and less physical game. Somehow, the newly built Santagiulia and Milano Rho ice rinks are neither, instead measuring an aberrant 197 x 85 feet. Also, the first exhibition game had to be paused when a hole cracked open in the ice, and the boards were replaced midway through the tournament because the black background behind the Olympic logo kept rendering the puck invisible at ice level.) Still, they got it done, and in the end the clumsy rollout was almost lovable, even fitting. Hardly anything seemed amiss once the stands were full of fans, ten-ounce Corona Extras (the only beer available for purchase) in hand, cheering beneath the chyrons proclaiming “IT’S ICE HOCKEY,” “IT’S YOUR VIBE.”
Men’s hockey began with a group stage that was woefully uneven from the start. In Group A, plucky Switzerland and Czechia and hapless France were pitted against juggernaut Canada. Group B was more competitive, with one exception, as Finland, Sweden, and Slovakia all scored easy wins over an even more hapless Italian team. Group C was seeding malpractice, as the US boxed out Latvia, Germany, and Denmark, none of whom ever stood a chance.
A notable absence was Russia. Had Russia somehow not invaded Ukraine in 2022 and been subsequently banned from international ice hockey, it likely would’ve been placed in Group C with the US. Russia has dramatically underperformed in hockey at the Olympics in the post-Soviet era, failing to medal since 2002 in games with NHL participation, but it’s inarguable that the exclusion of the third biggest hockey power in the world altered the dynamic of the tournament. It’s equally inarguable that Russia deserves to be excluded from international sports while the war in Ukraine continues, although it’s hard to make that argument with a straight face as the US murders fishermen and activists, kidnaps foreign heads of state, and puts immigrants in concentration camps while playing on. (That’s to say nothing of the grotesque farce of the now-disqualified last-place Israeli bobsled team, led by an active supporter of the genocide in Gaza.) Would Russia have medaled? Given its track record and uneven player pool, probably not, but it certainly could’ve made Team USA’s path more difficult.
Coming into the Olympics, the favorites were obvious. The question wasn’t whether Canada, the US, Sweden, or Finland would medal—it was which one of them would fail to do so. Czechia was such an obvious dark horse that the steed appeared rather pale, and there was some hope for Germany or Switzerland to make some noise too. What no one expected was a dazzling performance from Slovakia, the youngest team present, who capitalized on a shaky start from Finnish goaltender Juuse Saaros to take the very first game 4–1. In sports, the Slovaks have been the unambiguous loser of the Velvet Divorce, which had the negative consequence, among other things, of dissolving one of the world’s premier hockey nations. (The Czechs got the better end of the bargain, riding Jaromir Jagr and Dominik Hašek to victory in 1998, though they haven’t made it past the semifinals since.) Slovakia’s bronze medal in 2022 seemed like a fluke win driven by then 17-year-old prodigy Juraj Slafkovsky, and this year expectations were low for a team arriving in Milan with just seven NHLers on the roster.
Faced with a deadly Finnish team, however, the Slovaks tightened up, playing unselfishly and creatively in front of Samuel Hlavaj, a struggling NHL prospect who had the performance of a lifetime. (The halo effect of wearing a national jersey always seems most pronounced for goalies, who are more important than ever in the single-game elimination format of the Olympics.) The Finns rebounded admirably, defeating their arch-rival Sweden in the next game. Sweden seemed to hit the ice on the wrong skate, as it were, struggling more than they should have to defeat Italy and Slovakia. Italy lost every game, and so Hlavaj’s 102 saves in the three preliminary games improbably vaulted Slovakia into first place in Group B, with some help from a wonky tiebreaker format. Finland, with the fourth-best record overall, got a bye too, casting Sweden down into the playoff round.
Group A was boring. Canada dominated, besting Czechia 5–0, Switzerland 5–1, and France 10–2. The only truly notable thing that happened was the unexpected appearance of North American hockey’s most beloved tradition, fighting. Fights aren’t “allowed” in the NHL, but they don’t result in an automatic ejection like they do in the Olympics. That didn’t stop Washington Capitals‘ bruiser Tom Wilson from somehow pulling off the first Gordie Howe hat trick—a goal, an assist, and a fight—in Olympic history, as he squared up with French goon Pierre Crinon after Crinon elbowed the head of Wilson’s teammate Nathan MacKinnon. Wilson, whose reputation for violence is somewhat exaggerated, showed admirable restraint and wasn’t suspended. But things went from bad to worse for Crinon, who was promptly removed from the French team and had a criminal case reopened for an on-ice assault last year, when he repeatedly punched an opposing goalie in the face. (In no hockey culture is fighting the goalie acceptable, unless you are the other goalie.)
Group C was the most boring of all, as Team USA slowly and sleepily rolled through the preliminary round and came out with 5–1, 6–3, and 5–1 victories. As always, Latvia played with a lot of heart despite being hopelessly overmatched, while Denmark and Germany, each boasting a handful of stars and no depth behind them, showed why they’re hockey growth markets, not powerhouses.
With the seeding set, Canada, the US, Slovakia, and Finland took a day off while the rest battled for a quarterfinal spot. The Americans, clad in Polo Ralph Lauren, Lime-scootered around the Olympic Village, while the Slovaks celebrated like they had already won the tournament. The Canadians probably just practiced, no reporters allowed; utterly joyless in their quest for gold, Canada left the Olympic Village after one night and moved into a hotel, worried about catching Norovirus and reasoning that a more familiar, less distracting environment for their athletes would help them focus on victory at all costs. In the rinks, the results were predictable and unexciting: Switzerland beat Italy, Germany beat France, Czechia beat Denmark, and Sweden beat Latvia.
The playoff victors were cruelly rewarded with a back-to-back game against their higher seeded opponents the next day. Back-to-backs aren’t unfamiliar for NHL skaters, but they are for goalies, which in single-elimination poses a crucial question to coaches: Can you afford to save your best guy for tomorrow? (Olympic rosters include three goalies, but the starter, backup, and emergency backup hierarchy is usually quite clear.) Both Czechia and Sweden opted to double up, taking their chances with the best-performing goalie on their rosters (the expected Lukas Dostal and the unexpected Jacob Markstrom, respectively). Switzerland too was relying on its man in goal, 38-year-old Swiss goaltending legend Leonardo Genoni, who has somehow never played in the NHL, especially after early injuries took out key forwards Kevin Fiala and Denis Malgin. (The season-ending injury to Fiala, who plays for the LA Kings, is exactly why NHL teams aren’t always excited about the Olympics: It may very well cost LA this year’s playoffs.) Not all teams can outscore each other, but anyone can get goalied, and for the smaller nations this is the only realistic path to victory.
Slovakia–Germany, the early game, was prognosticated as a tossup. It turned out to be anything but, as the Slovaks delivered a 6–2 beatdown, a true team effort in which their superstar Slafkovsky only registered a single assist.
It wasn’t quite clear what to expect from Canada–Czechia. Czechia’s talented roster, backstopped by Dostal, was a favorite to at least compete for bronze, but the team had so far seemed out of sorts, playing below their level in the preliminary games. The Czechs seemed to understand that they couldn’t outscore Canada, but they could grind them down to eke out a lead. Anaheim Ducks captain Radko Gudas, affectionately known as “Butcher,” set the tone by viciously throwing his body around, taking not one but two runs at Sidney Crosby, the Canadian captain and hero of the 2010 gold medal game. Gudas couldn’t have known that he was removing Crosby from what was almost certainly the Pittsburgh Penguins legend’s final Olympics, but he certainly wouldn’t have acted any differently if he did. It wasn’t even really a dirty hit, but Crosby’s unsuccessful duck caused his leg to buckle awkwardly. Crosby skated off the ice, unable to put weight on his leg, and left for the locker room, never to return.
For the rest of the Canadians, desperation set in as they fired shot after shot at Dostal, finally tying the game 2–2. The Czechs held firm, however, and after Tomas Hertl blocked a shot with his body, Martin Necas rushed the puck up the ice, and Ondrej Palat scored, giving Czechia a 3–2 lead with seven minutes to go, it seemed like it was over. What everyone—the referees, the coaches, the players, and the media—missed in this moment of elation/despair was the blindingly obvious presence of a sixth Czech player on the ice, a missed penalty that led directly to the would-be game-winning goal. Yet Canada played on, and the world was spared an officiating scandal of unheard-of proportions by Nick Suzuki’s game-tying deflection sent both teams to overtime. A few minutes went by before Mitch Marner finally found a backhand shot Dostal couldn’t stop, sending Canada on to the semifinal.
In the other arena, a similar near-upset took place. The Swiss team took and held an early 2–0 lead over Finland, and then choked on it. Genoni would later tell reporters his team was “scared” to score the third goal, and their conservatism cost them. Finland refused to give up, attacking relentlessly until Sebastian Aho finally got on the board with six minutes left, and then battled for a 6–5 goal from Miro Heiskanen in the final two minutes. When a game gets tied like that, you know who’s winning before overtime even starts.
On paper, Team USA got the toughest draw of the quarterfinals, even if the Swedish team was mysteriously and worryingly underperforming. One explanation for Sweden’s funk might be found in the by-all-indications extremely hostile relationship between coach Sam Hallam and his players, a feud marked by baffling lineup choices. Hallam inexplicably benched stars Filip Forsberg and Oliver Ekman-Larsson for much of the preliminary round, and scratched defenseman Rasmus Andersson in the quarterfinal, only to lose his star D-man, Victor Hedman, to an injury during warmups. (No in-game substitutions can be made in the Olympics.) Even stranger, Hallam dressed forward Jesper Bratt, only to bench him for the entirety of the first and second periods and then throw him onto the ice in the third period and overtime.
Still, the Swedish roster was talented enough to win anyway, and they very nearly did. Despite being outshot by the US, the massive Markstrom (6’6″ and 207 pounds without goalie gear) kept his team alive with save after save; only a picture perfect deflection from Detroit’s Dylan Larkin was able to get past him. Until the final minutes, it looked like the Americans were going to nurse a one-goal lead and ride the game out. Then, with Markstrom pulled and six Swedish skaters on the ice, Larkin’s Red Wings teammate Lucas Raymond made a spectacular backhand pass to Mika Zibanejad, who banked it home over American goalie Connor Hellebuyck’s shoulder and sent the third game of the day into overtime. Three minutes later, in a moment destined for cliché, US defenseman Quinn Hughes waved off a line change to stay on the ice, swirled around Swedish captain Gabriel Landeskog, and fired the puck past Markstrom. As coach, sportscaster, or movie character might say, he “called game.”
The oddsmakers had pretty clear favorites for the semifinals two days later: Canada over Finland, with difficulty, the US over Slovakia, with ease. They were, as they often are, more or less correct.
It’s hard to say if the Finns deserve credit for their gameplan in the semifinal, since they stuck to it perfectly for half the game and utterly failed to execute it for the other. Finland came out body checking, and once again the Canadians didn’t seem to know what had hit them. Still missing Crosby, Canada was discombobulated, struggling to break out of their own zone and struggling even more to get quality shots on Saaros, who masterfully put his game together as the tournament went on. The Canadians already looked strained when a power play goal from Mikko Rantanen put Finland ahead; once Erik Haula scored a shorthanded goal, it was like the second tower had come down. For the second time in three days, it really seemed like Canada was going to lose. But, as the saying goes, a two-goal lead is the most dangerous lead in hockey.
As Canada responded furiously, the Finns found themselves in the exact position they had put Switzerland in two days prior. They turtled and clung to their lead, treating the second half of the game like a thirty minute–long penalty kill. You couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of “tilting the ice,” as Canada battered Saaros until the tying goal. (A mere six feet tall, Saaros is small for a modern-day goalie, prompting the Canadians to shoot high and causing at least four shots to catch him in the head.) Finland should’ve challenged the tying goal for goaltender interference, with the diminutive Brad Marchand tumbling over Saaros’s back and forcing him out of position. But the risk of losing the challenge and being assessed a penalty at that critical moment proved too much for the scowling, jowly Finnish coach Antti Pennanen. Pennanen finally used his challenge too late, when Nathan MacKinnon took the lead with thirty-six seconds left. Pennanen alleged that Canada’s 19-year-old wunderkind Macklin Celebrini was offside, but all he achieved was a few grueling minutes of video review to delay the heartbreak.
The other semifinal, the US versus Slovakia, was the first game of the tournament to truly disappoint. The Slovaks, who had so much confidence and swagger up until that point, seemed to suddenly realize how far above their heads they had been playing, and just like that the magic was gone. Hlavaj battled admirably, but once the score was 4–0 he was wisely pulled from the game, the coach opting to protect his goalie’s self-esteem for the bronze medal rather than let him continue to get lit up in an unwinnable game. It felt over already after the first the US goal, as the Slovaks fought tooth and nail for dignity while the Americans flexed their goal-scoring muscles and looked forward to the gold-medal game.
I wish I could say that the bronze medal matchup was exciting, that a Slovakia–Finland rematch delivered upon the promise of newfound bad blood, and that the Slovaks’ fairytale run ended with treasure found, if casted in bronze rather than gold. Alas, it did not. The game was instead boring enough that NBC’s commentators spent more time discussing the following day’s gold-medal game than they did on play-by-play. To the Slovaks’ credit, for those of us actually paying attention, it felt tighter in the moment than the final score of 6–1 would suggest. Finland, newly without Rantanen, who had been injured in the game against Canada, dutifully and methodically worked Slovakia, giving the Slovaks absolutely nothing in the way of scoring chances. The only thing between Finland and a shutout was the wacky Santagiulia glass, as a freak bounce behind the Finnish net gifted Slovak captain Tomas Tatar a layup. Finland won bronze, as they always seem to, some kind of consolation for the opportunity they had let slip out of their grasp the night before, and Slovakia went home with nothing but a bright and promising future.
The final event of the entire Olympics, the gold-medal game was a marquee event despite a start time of 8:10 AM Eastern. (According to Nielsen, it was the most-watched pre-9 AM sporting event in American history, with a peak viewership of twenty-six million.) A frequent point of discussion among American players, commentators, and analysts was the ostensibly one-sided nature of the US–Canada rivalry, defined as it has been by utter dominance from the north. In NHL-inclusive Olympics, Canada has beaten the US every time it counted: for the gold medal in 2002 and 2010, and in the semifinals in 2014. Canada hadn’t lost a game in an Olympics with NHL players since a preliminary-round US victory in Vancouver in 2010. Everyone was wondering: Does Canada consider the US its biggest rival too?
This line of thinking struck me as a basically specious attempt to further position Team USA as the underdog, another aw-shucks tip of the cap to the boys (men) of the “Miracle.” Obviously Canada considers the US its biggest rival. They’re playing in the gold medal game, and the Soviet Union no longer exists. Still, Canada has historically had the decisive upper hand in what is after all their national sport, and, like all aspiring competitors, the US has had to respond with manufactured hate.
Last year, in a kind of dry run for a return to the Olympics, the NHL staged a miniature tournament called the Four Nations Face-Off. Canada won that, but the US was able to snag a round-robin win and also to make a splash with three fights in the first nine seconds. (The tournament was played by NHL rules, so fisticuffs were acceptable.) Coinciding with the rollout of Trump’s tariffs, there was also a lot of retaliatory anthem booing, a phenomenon that either the distance, the ticket prices, or the Olympic spirit seemed to foreclose in Milan. The chants of “USA! USA! USA!” still echoed through the Santagiulia stands, conjuring visions of the barracks or the frat house, but there’s a flatness to the prepackaged jingoism of American chest-pumping, especially when compared to the artful call-and-response jeers and whistles of the more spirited European fans. American hockey may have proven superior, but you can’t tell me this plastic country has a deeper sense of self than Slovakia or Finland. Even for fascist nations like our own, sports can’t quite make up for a sick and desiccated culture, though we’ve been trying for a century and counting. (There’s a reason why Triumph of the Will is a better movie than Olympia, and October or Man With a Movie Camera are better still.)
But if the US–Canada rivalry didn’t quite move the people, it certainly moved the sixty-six players in Milan. On the ice those guys really hate each other, even and sometimes especially when they’re teammates back home.1 But their hatred is less a political shibboleth than just plain sports; the players want to win for the flag because it’s the biggest game they’ll ever play, and when you put players this good who want to win this badly against each other, the game is going to be something, tariffs or not.
Either of these teams could have won, and both of them almost did. A few bounces stood between each side and victory: Matt Boldy’s midair flip of the puck past Canada’s top defenders to give the US an early lead; Auston Matthews choosing to pass instead of shooting on an open net, missing a chance to double that lead; Connor Hellebuyck miraculously blocking Devon Toews’s shot with his stick while falling backwards, recalling 2018 Braden Holtby; Nathan MacKinnon missing an open net; Sam Bennett high-sticking Jack Hughes and drawing blood, an automatic double penalty, in the waning minutes of the third period; Jack Hughes getting called for a high stick of his own shortly thereafter, negating that penalty; Hughes’s overtime game-winning goal. Granted, some miracles seem more earned than fated: The extremely talented Hellebuyck, long maligned for his inability to deliver in the playoffs, certainly slayed some personal demons with an absolutely jaw-dropping forty-one–save performance.
Team USA’s roster and system, designed to grind out a close win against Canada above all else, did in fact work, exiting the tournament with a perfect penalty kill. But the fact that Bill Guerin picked the “right” if not the best guys doesn’t mean that Canada picked wrong. While the Canadian roster and coaching have and will continue to be picked apart, inflection points like the absence of Crosby or the decision to start Binnington instead of Logan Thompson (who despite lacking Binnington’s pedigree has had a better season and is probably simply a better goalie) can’t explain alone why Canada lost. Hockey is the flukiest of sports, and there’s no perfect combination of decisions one can make to will a desired outcome into existence. Cliches endure because they contain some essential truth, and perhaps no cliché is more essentially true than the fact that sometimes the bounces just don’t come your way; all you can do is grab them when they do. Believing in miracles doesn’t mean you have to believe magic too.
The US–Canada rivalry in men’s hockey pales in comparison, however, to that of the women’s teams. Those women really hate each other, not least because they are for all intents and purposes the only competitive national teams in women’s hockey and play each other significantly more frequently. The American women defeated Canada in their own spectacular goal medal game in Milan several days earlier, earning their first gold since 2018 (they now have three gold medals to Canada’s five). The excitement of an American double gold was instantly soured by a leaked video of President Trump’s congratulatory call to the wildly intoxicated men’s team, on speakerphone held by gleeful hockey fanatic Kash Patel, personal friend and invitee of GM Bill Guerin, during which Trump joked that “we’re going to have bring the women’s team, you do know that” to roars of laughter from the locker room. It’s hardly surprising that the team would gleefully join the president’s circus show, hockey culture being the conservative, insular, and perennially tone-deaf world that it is, but one still naively wishes they wouldn’t have been so quick and thoughtless about poisoning the moment. The drunken carousing continued from Milan to Miami to DC, where Trump’s now-traditional McDonald’s banquet and State of the Union address were attended by twenty of twenty-five players and Connor Hellebuyck was promised the Presidential Medal of Freedom by a head of state delighted to show off a big, unambiguous, and, most importantly, delightfully nostalgic win. ↩
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