USA vs. Canada: an Olympic men’s hockey gold-medal game for the ages

MILAN — Canada and the United States meet Sunday in a men’s hockey game that has been played in the hearts and minds of the two countries for decades.

Played out in the lounge of the Empire Hotel and the Barn Hockey Bar in Chicago.

Played out on indoor rinks from North Vancouver to Scottsdale to Newmarket and suburban Boston, on Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis and outdoor rinks like the one in Cranbrook, B.C., built by firefighters from the fire station next door, anything frozen enough to support a kid chasing a puck and a dream.

Two nations – one its national identity forever and inextricably linked to the game, the other convinced it no longer needs a miracle to beat the world’s best – have been chasing it through the years, through the National Hockey League’s dozen years in Olympic exile, to this moment:

Team USA versus Team Canada for the gold medal and so much more, the crowning moment for the Milano Cortina Olympic Games. It is the sport’ and the nations’ dream final.

“It is the game everybody wanted and hoped for,” Canada forward Connor McDavid said.

“It’s best on best,” U.S. forward Matthew Tkachuk said. “It’s what every American and Canadian grows up watching, grows up caring about. This is the pinnacle of the sport. This is as good as it gets, and a rivalry that’s as good as it gets. So there will be not one TV without this game on in the United States.”

“We know,” Canada right winger Tom Wilson said, “there are 40 million people at home on the edge of their seat, waiting for this to happen.”

It will be 60 minutes of such divine importance that its deliverance has restored our faith in God – or at least the hockey gods. The U.S. needed overtime to get past Sweden in the tournament’s quarterfinals. Canada twice trailed Czechia in its quarterfinal before prevailing in overtime and then had to overcome a two-goal deficit to get past Finland in the semifinals and safely advance to the final.

“I know we’re putting the country through it, but it will hopefully be worth it in the end,” McDavid said. “It’s stressful to watch and just as stressful to play, but when you win like that, it’s a lot of fun.”

‘There is nothing better’

If Sunday’s final is as U.S. forward Dylan Larkin put it “a game for the ages,” it’s also a game of its age – the Age of Trump.

Even before speculation in Italian and British media on whether President Trump, a self-proclaimed “hockey fan,” will attend the final and then the closing ceremony in Verona, the Trump presidency has poured lighter fluid onto what was already one of the nastiest rivalries in international sports and casting it in a larger political and cultural context.

“We’re the best country in the world,” Tkachuk said. “The greatest honor in the world is wearing this red, white and blue. To do that in an Olympic final, there is nothing better.”

Team Canada’s players perhaps feel even more emboldened while wearing the maple leaf sweater given the game’s significance in Canadian history and culture.

“The thing about hockey in Canada as opposed to hockey in other countries is that the sport percolates far deeper into our national soil and thus effects everything we grow in it,” Douglas Coupland wrote in “Souvenir of Canada.”

And Trump, in a series of statements and policies, has shaken Canada to its very roots.

“And here’s my problem with Canada,” Trump said last year. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state.”

Trump also referred to then-prime minister Justin Trudeau as “a governor.”

“I covered referendums,” Roy MacGregor, The Globe and Mail columnist and author of “Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People,” said during an interview on the Canadian Geographic podcast.

“I’ve been there when everybody thought it was the end of the world and it wasn’t. This time, what I truly believe began as a joke turned into a real story that Trump really wanted to (make Canada the 51st state) and hurt us. I don’t have to go down the list of what we have done for the United States. We have been an ally that has been 100 percent reliable and more. And then suddenly, we find out that our so-called closest friend is dumping on us, accusing us of things that aren’t true, attacking us and trying to disorient us.”

One year ago

The threat collision between Trump’s foreign and economic policies, his threat of annexation, provided the backdrop to the 4 Nations Face Off’s first match between the two countries on Feb. 15 last year at Montreal’s Bell Centre.

That night, Canadian fans booed the playing of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the game. Then just two seconds into the game, Tkachuk squared off with Canada’s Brandon Hagel. Tkachuk and Hagel had no more taken a seat in the penalty box when Tkachuk’s brother Brady yelled at Canada’s Sam Bennett: “Hey, Benny after this we’re going.” Just moments after Brady and Bennett were finished fighting, a third fight broke out. The game was just nine seconds old. The U.S. went on to win 3-1.

The morning of the tournament final Feb. 20 in Boston, a confident Trump posted on his Truth Social account: “I’ll be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State.”

During the call, Trump told the team “I have great respect for hockey players. I’m a hockey fan. I love hockey. The talent, the skill that you have is crazy.”

Later that day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was looking “forward to watching the game tonight. And we look forward to the United States beating our soon-to-be 51st state, Canada.”

McDavid’s overtime goal, however, gave Canada a 3-2 victory and Trudeau the last word.

“You can’t take our country – and you can’t take our game,” the prime minister said.

“The booing of the U.S. anthem (at 4 Nations) was so un-Canadian,” said MacGregor, who also co-authored “Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada” with Montreal Canadiens Hall of Fame goaltender and later cabinet minister Ken Dryden.

“Can you imagine anything more un-Canadian than for us to show disrespect to another country’s anthem? But it changed us, that funny cliché, ‘elbows up.’ That’s a hockey term too, of course, from Gordie Howe. I’ve liked it. I’ve felt good these last few months about being Canadian and seeing Canadians who usually are at odds with each other, depending on where they live, locking arms. I’m not running around thinking that, I’m not Alberta, I am not Quebec, I’m not this and that. I am all those things, I hope. I hope they feel they are all these things as well. Canada is Canada is Canada.”

‘We want to make them proud’

While Canadians might be more united in response to a common threat, the national unity has only added to the pressure on Team Canada players.

“We talk about it,” Canada forward Macklin Celebrini said. “Whenever you represent Canada, it means a bit more and there is more pressure on you to execute. We will go into that game doing everything we can to win. That rich history and what it means to our country – we want to make them proud.”

A Trump appearance Sunday would only add to the spectacle, but most of the “will he or won’t he?” talk in recent days has surrounded whether Team Canada superstar Sidney Crosby will be available for Sunday’s final.

Crosby scored the overtime game-winning goal in the 2010 Olympic final against the U.S. in Vancouver and also found the back of the net against Sweden in the 2014 Games gold-medal game.

Crosby left in the second period of Wednesday’s quarterfinal with a lower-body injury and did not return after taking two hard hits. He did not dress for Friday’s semifinal.

“I watched him skate today,” Canada coach Jon Cooper said after the team’s closed practice Saturday. “We’re going to meet tonight and have a determination of what’s going to happen tomorrow. He won’t put himself in harm’s way, and he’s not going to put the team in harm’s way.”

In Crosby’s absence, McDavid filled in as Captain Canada against Sweden. McDavid, 29, has been the player of the tournament so far, establishing a single-tournament record for points in Olympic Games involving NHL players with 13, and dishing out as many assists (11) in Milano Cortina as the previous points record holders, Finland’s Teemu Selanne and Saku Koivu had points.

McDavid, who is on track for his ninth career 100-point season with the Edmonton Oilers, goes into the Olympic final riding a five multi-point game streak for Team Canada.

“That kid is so talented and is just a phenomenal kid,” Cooper said of McDavid. “He has come in here on a mission. These are the best players in the world and he is finding a way to rise above.”

“There’s a huge gap between him and the rest of the world,” said Italy defender Gregory Di Tomaso, who played with McDavid in the Ontario Hockey League.

The revelation of the tournament has been Celebrini, Team Canada’s 19-year-old forward.

The San Jose Sharks rookie, playing with a poise that belies his age, scored Canada’s first goal of the tournament and leads the tournament with five goals. His 11 points are second only to McDavid.

“He plays the game well beyond his years,” Cooper said of the North Vancouver native. “He is just going to get better and better. He has a skill set that not too many guys have.”

Cooper has played Celebrini on a line with McDavid and increasingly with Nathan MacKinnon. He led the Canadians in minutes played against Sweden at 25:53.

“He’s generational, that kid,” Cooper said. “I’m surprised I didn’t play him more.”

MacKinnon’s semifinal winning goal with 35 seconds remaining in regulation should not have come as a surprise. He has scored 10 go-ahead goals in the final 45 seconds of regulation this season for the Colorado Avalanche.

‘We understand the magnitude of it’

On Sunday, the Canadian trio will face the tournament’s hottest goaltender in Connor Hellebuyck, who leads the Olympics in save percentage (94.74) and goals against average (1.23).

The U.S. defense has also generated plenty of offense.

Defenseman Zach Werenski assisted on half of Team USA’s six goals against Slovakia, tying records for most points by American player in an Olympic playoff game of the NHL era and most points by a U.S. defenseman in any NHL-era Olympic game.

The U.S. defense Sunday will also have one key piece it was missing in the 4 Nations tournament.

Quinn Hughes was sidelined for the tournament with an oblique injury. In Milano Cortina, Hughes is tied for third in assists with six, equaling his childhood hero Duncan Keith for the most assists by a defenseman in a single Olympics tournament in the NHL era.

And it was Hughes’ end-to-end, sudden-death overtime goal against Sweden that kept the Americans’ gold-medal dream alive.

“That is unreal,” said U.S. forward Jack Hughes, Quinn’s younger brother. “That is a massive goal, in a massive moment.”

And now the moment has arrived.

A moment that has arrived at a collision point of politics and sports, the game of two country’s dreams and now potentially a national nightmare.

“We understand the magnitude of it,” U.S. forward Jack Eichel said.

Yet in the midst of all the talk of a 51st state, of booed anthems and protest signs that read “True North, Strong and Peeved,” the game for the ages and of its age Sunday will be decided as it always has been in decades of dreams, on the same shiny, brilliant surface that reflects those dreamers in the light.

There is a Quebecois phrase: On va régler tout ça sur la glace.

Which means: We’ll sort it all out on the ice.

“Here we are,” Jack Hughes said “we’re going to find out who the best team at the Olympics is.”

WINTER OLYMPICS MEN’S GOLD-MEDAL GAME

Who: USA vs. Canada

When: 5:10 a.m. PT Sunday

Where: Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, Milan

TV: NBC (Ch. 4), Peacock