Duhatschek: Heartbreak for Canadian women's hockey team in gold-medal loss to United States (2024)

Heartbreak, it turns out, can cut two ways.

Four years after experiencing the dizzying heights of a stunning and improbable victory in Sochi, Canada’s women’s Olympic hockey team learned how the other half lived – the other half being their arch-rivals from the United States.

The last time the two played for the gold medal, in February 2014, the Americans were on the losing side of a withering and gutting defeat. It was a game in which they were ahead by two goals with fewer than four minutes to go in regulation, but ultimately surrendered the lead and then lost in overtime on a power-play goal by Canada’s Marie-Philip Poulin. Canada celebrated its fourth consecutive gold medal. After the tears subsided, the U.S. women seethed. They carried the weight of that defeat for four years, Monique Lamoureux-Morando noting how they trained every day in the interim for a chance at redemption.

Fast forward to Thursday night in Pyeongchang, South Korea for another instant Olympic classic.

The same two opponents met again and after 60 minutes, it was the same high drama and the same 2-2 tie. Twenty minutes of four-on-four overtime produced close calls at both ends, but no goals, meaning the verdict came down to a shootout.

Shootouts are no way to decide a gold medal, in a game that featured 80 minutes of high-energy, seesaw hockey, but those are the rules and both sides are aware of them and the time to lobby for changes is at the next International Ice Hockey Federation annual meeting. In the moment, you just have to deal with reality.

And in the sixth round of the shootout, after each team had scored twice, Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson, Monique’s twin sister, sealed the deal, with a brilliant back-and-forth deke that left Canadian goaltender Shannon Szabados sprawled on the ice, unable to make the save. Canada’s last chance was Meghan Agosta, who’d scored once earlier in the shootout against American goalie Maddie Rooney.

But this time, Agosta tried to go between the legs, Rooney made the save, and the celebration began, the Americans tackling Rooney, 10 of them exorcising four years’ worth of demons from Sochi. It was a tough-to-swallow ending to an extraordinary game that proved once again the margin for error among the top two teams in women’s hockey is razor thin – and that one play, one moment, is the difference between a gold-medal celebration and a tear-stained silver-medal loss. Officially, it went into the record books as a 3-2 victory for the Americans, ending a 24-game Olympic win streak for the Canadian team.

IT’S OVER.#USA defeats #CAN in 6 shootout rounds to win #gold in women’s hockey#CAN takes the #silverhttps://t.co/Msrw5MGIhG pic.twitter.com/5kb4E4wzUA

— CBC Olympics (@CBCOlympics) February 22, 2018

You watch a game like that and it makes you ponder, among other things, what makes a rivalry great? It’s usually competitiveness, above all else. If it’s Charlie Brown and Lucy playing checkers and getting the same result over and over, that’s not much of a rivalry. But Canada and the United States, in women’s hockey, is a rivalry that keeps going back and forth. The U.S. are the defending world champions, having won last year’s title in overtime. Canada won the preliminary round game at the Olympics, by a 2-1 count, though the Americans outshot them almost two-to-one. Both teams were centralized back in the summer and made some tough lineup calls. The U.S. replaced several popular veteran players, including Kelli Stack and Alexa Carpenter. Canada saw much of its leadership group from 2014 – Hayley Wickenheiser, Jayna Hefford, Caroline Ouellette, Catherine Ward — retire.

There were new faces sprinkled into both lineups and some veterans, to provide experience and help bring composure. Pretty much everybody figured it would come down to the wire and it did.

The U.S. went up early in the gold-medal game, on a power-play goal by Hilary Knight, as Canada ran into penalty trouble early. The second period went mostly Canada’s way, with Haley Irwin scoring the tying goal two minutes in, tipping in Blayre Turnbull’s centering pass. Canada took its first – and as it turned out – only lead when Poulin took a feed from Agosta and wristed a shot over Rooney’s left shoulder. It looked for a long time as if that would be enough and that Poulin would continue her legacy of scoring the game winner in every Olympic Games. Alas, it wasn’t to be.

With six minutes to go in regulation, Lamoureux-Morando got behind the Canadian defence on a bad line change to score the tying goal on a breakaway. That set the stage for four-on-four overtime, where the play went back and forth. Overall, the Americans had the better chances in overtime, but after Kelly Pannek rattled one off the goal post, Szabados turned everything else aside. With 1:35 to go in OT, Megan Keller pulled Poulin down and put Canada on the power play, which is exactly how they pulled it out in 2014. But this time, Rebecca Johnston’s chance from the edge of the crease fluttered just past the bar. For a second, Johnston thought she’d won it, and raised her arms, as if to celebrate.

Overall, it was a hard-working, hard-fought game, but not crisply played. The ice looked chippy; there were lots of bobbles on both sides of the puck. Agosta was sensational for Canada, likely their best player. Poulin played hard — and at one point, absolutely wiped out Keller, with a crushing and unpenalized hit. Melodie Daoust, the third member of the line, played with real energy – she was ultimately named tournament MVP, the voting done before the final result was in.

On the day Canada named the Olympic team in Calgary, I asked both Poulin and veteran Meaghan Mikkelson if they liked the idea of a one-game, winner-take-all showdown that you see in the Olympics because it was pretty clear all along that it could come down to that.

Poulin, the captain of this year’s team, was pretty frank: “I do and I don’t,” she said. “It’s really whoever’s ready to go that day that’s going to win. There are no second chances. That’s why we’ve been here since August – to prepare every day as if it’s the final game, so at the end of the day, we’re ready when it’s time.”

Mikkelson embraced the challenge, noting: “That’s what makes the Olympics so special – that the margin for error is so small no matter what sport you’re in – you look at the skiers, the lugers, the figure skaters. It’s performance on demand and high amounts of pressure. I think that’s what we all love about it, too.”

Certainly, it’s what the spectators love about it – though seeing all those empty seats at the venue for a gold-medal final was a little off-putting. Still, it will be interesting to see where women’s hockey is four years from now, when the Olympics go to China for 2022. Currently, there are two women’s professional leagues, the CWHL and the NWHL. Is a merger possible between now and the Beijing Games? And if so, does that create greater professional opportunities for players, once their college careers are over?

As it is, women’s hockey is a sport where the rest of the world beyond Canada and the United States is improving, but not catching up in any meaningful way to the two perennial powerhouses. The hopes for a more competitive Olympic tournament seemed to hinge on improvements elsewhere, but that belief doesn’t take into account the way the sport exploded over the past two decades across North America. Overall, the players are fitter, faster, and better schooled in fundamentals at an earlier age. The gold-medal final in Nagano 20 years ago, which was the last time the Canadian women settled for silver, bore only a small resemblance to the way the two teams played in Pyeongchang.

The only genuine similarity between ’98 and 2018 is how crushed the Canadian players were by their second-place finish. The fact that they are silver medalists in an Olympic sport seemed to provide little solace. Instead, it’ll force them to go back to the drawing board and plan for 2022 and try to reverse the result, something the Americans know only too well.

(Top photo credit: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Eric Duhatschek is a senior hockey writer for The Athletic. He spent 17 years as a columnist for The Globe and Mail and 20 years covering the Calgary Flames and the NHL for the Calgary Herald. In 2001, he won the Elmer Ferguson Award, given by the Hockey Hall of Fame for distinguished hockey journalism, and previously served on the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee. Follow Eric on Twitter @eduhatschek