"Nice Game" Remains America's Hockey Moment
You can't plan a legend, and you can't appoint a hero.
Maybe the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" was not the best game ever by a USA hockey team, or the most important.
But it remains the Great American Hockey Story.
We're approaching three decades since Jim Craig and his mates pulled off their big upset over the USSR. ("Nice game," offered Soviet captain Boris Mikhailov.) No victory before or since comes close.
Almost nobody remembers the 1960 edition of Team USA, which also won Olympic gold.
The women's Olympic victory in 1998 is little more than a footnote, as is the 2004 World Junior title.
Only devoted hockey fans know about the 1996 World Cup, when the Americans staged a third period comeback to beat Canada for the championship.
Ryan Dixon of the Hockey News makes a solid argument for the 1996 team as America's true hockey titans:
...for all the shock value the Miracle held, in many ways Team USA’s win in 1996 was more substantive. The most significant aspect of the triumph was that there was no miracle involved. The Americans put together a team that was simply superior to Canada’s entry – and everyone else’s for that matter – and the results bore out.Good point. But he's making a hockey argument, and the Miracle on Ice wasn't really about hockey.
In most memories, it's the story that counts, not the game.
How the 1980 US Olympic team created its "Miracle On Ice."
Why the 1980 Olympic team looms large in the sporting imagination.
Miracle, the 2004 film starring Kurt Russell.
Miracle comes in at number five.
Photo: (Steve Powell/Getty Images)
Comments
Both wonderful, those U.S. Olympic gold teams, but the elephant in this room is that we only seem to win when the Winter Olympics are in…the U.S.A. This is the home advantage, like China running up medals right now. Hockey needs to matter more, women’s and men’s, in places where people can’t skate, which is a problem.Anyway, the real issue about hockey in the O’s is no more NHL players! Jagr was injured by a garbage shot from some guy for no reason, and it wrecked the Rangers from February into that brutal first-round elimination. No More.