Team USA’s Gold Is Sweeter For The Struggle

The members of the U.S. women's Olympic hockey team may not admit to this, but they needed to have the pants scared off them by Canada to give the whole gold medal exercise some badly needed historical context. They needed Hilary Knight's reaper-cheating goal with 2:04 left in regulation to tie the game 1-1 and relocate their binary rivalry with our northern brethren and sistren, and they especially needed Megan Keller's ultra-crafty game-winning goal in overtime to make it all stick—not just for the postgame pictures, but for the rest of their lives.

But that's the thing about America's relationship with the Winter Olympics. It is not just a hinder-kicking medal exercise like the Summer Games, because there are too many events at which the U.S. simply is not pre-eminent, or even minimally eminent. Skimo, for example, a new event that dared to ask the question "Why not ski up the mountain?", was designed specifically for Europeans who can't get to work by bus. For the U.S., the tensest Winter Olympic moments matter because the margins of victory are simply not sufficiently wide or sufficiently plentiful to allow for much in the way of jingoistic preening. Genuine drama substitutes for the usual heady mix of arrogance and dominance. And drama was the only aspect of the task at which the American women's hockey side had been particularly poor.