In Pic :Overtime hero Marie-Philip Poulin is all smiles after beating the U.S. for Olympic hockey gold in Sochi Thursday.
Every Thursday, I play hockey with Nat, Tee, Goner and about 12 other women. I play goal. I look forward to it more than any other skate, partly because we’re very post-modern — men and women dressing, and sometimes undressing, together — and partly because the players are unlike any others with whom I skate. One woman started playing a few years ago, to prove something to her children. A pair of others — a couple — have long been involved in the game. And one of them, Dee, the best skater, teaches other beginners to play hockey in a skate that happens after ours. Dee is a gamer. I have a few hockey heroes and she is one of them.
This Thursday, I looked forward to my ladies skate because of what the other big hockey ladies were doing that afternoon: Canada vs. U.S. for the Olympic gold. For decades, female hockey players had been cast out; called ugly, called “men” and called dykes (even if they weren’t). Their playing time was crowbarred into small hours at the worst times in maybe a handful of rinks around the country. They were fitted in pink sweaters, and told to trim facial hair, look proper, act neutral. Don’t sound too manly. Don’t sound too butch. Slapshots are unbecoming. And yet the whole of Canada stopped yesterday and watched as a group of women produced one of the greatest games played in the history of the sport.
It was a slow burn, made even hotter with the quickness of the match strike. Team USA led 2-0 moving into the latter stages of the game. Canada scrambled to attack, but slow ice and tired legs made a comeback difficult, maybe improbable. Because Gods produce drama at their own folly, you would have been excused with 10 minutes left in the agonizing third period for thinking ahead: laundry, pick up kids from school, dinner and then a reflection on all of the time you spent watching midday hockey when you should have been, maybe, saving the world or helping down at the shelter. But then a wobbly puck floated like a lovestruck butterfly into the Team USA goal (2-1) and later, with only a few seconds to play, another goal (2-2), which came after the Americans had hit the post on an empty net. And so, overtime. The shelter would have to wait a moment longer.
If you fought through the narrative of what, at one point, seemed like a relatively easy U.S. victory, you were rewarded with a remarkable ending that produced drama to make Chekhov blush. Despite Canada equalizing after Marie-Philip Poulin’s smooth cross-crease move with goalie Shannon Szabados out for an extra attacker, the beginning of overtime started with an American assault: one shot, then another from close range, each of them deflecting into the webbing above the boards. The Americans — ponytailed, eye-liner’ed, Kessel’ed and tough as burlap — tried to win it fast, and, as a result, the British referee was forced to call Catherine Ward for cross-checking, producing a four on three power play that lasted only as long as it took an American to slash Szabados. After that, the barn door stayed closed. Canada’s demons were their own.
Both sides played three on three, then four on four, and then Hayley Wickenheiser, that great steam engine of a skater, seized the puck inside the blueline. With the vastness of the empty ice in front of her, she raced blissfully ahead; no panic, no anxiety; one last joyful dash before she, inevitably, hangs up the blades on one of the greatest amateur careers of all time. Fading at the U.S. blueline, she was caught by Hilary Knight, who was assessed a two-minute penalty for dragging the player down. Canada gathered for the power play with Poulin on the left side.
It didn’t take long. Canada rotated the puck among its skaters, and, eventually, the American goalie was lost to the angles. Poulin had lots of net and she used it, punching the twine. Gracefully, coolly, she pivoted to face her bench, proving that yard sale celebrations are for those who’ve never been there before. In 1972 in Moscow, Paul Henderson scored three game-winning goals against the Russians. Poulin, for her part, tied the game, then won it. That it also happened in Russia makes for even better poetry.
As much as the game was a triumph of Canada over the U.S.A. — a plug of spiritual bubblegum whose taste will never get stale — it was important because of who was playing — women — and who was watching — all of us. In the aftermath, I drove to the rink excited to be among the ladies, to talk about the game with them. Upon arriving, I found Tee sitting at the end of the dressing room bench. “How about that?!” I asked. She said, “Yeah. I was riding my bike here when a guy in an old truck came up beside me, rolled down his window and shouted at the top of his lungs, ‘Women’s hockey, yaaaa!!!’ ”
It was a historic day in more ways than one.
National Post
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