Cote: 46 years later and on top of world, USA hockey owns Canada’s sport | Opinion
A generation or 10 minutes from now, history will not remember or care which team had the most shots or seemingly the better of play in the 2026 Winter Olympics gold medal game in men’s hockey.
History will only note that the player who had the last shot on Sunday in Italy was a young man who wore a team jersey that read ‘USA’ and who looked picture-perfect for hockey — a broken front tooth in a bloody smile. Because of Jack Hughes’ winning overtime goal in the 2-1 triumph and the goaltending of Connor Hellebuyck, their team’s players had the gold around their necks.
It was the players of favored Canada who bent for their silver medals with the look of mourners. One was Canadian superstar Connor McDavid, whose latest grand-stage disappointment only fed the narrative (started by me), that for all his individual glories, McDavid remains McOverrated.
Canada had owned Team USA before this in a rivalry so heated that U.S. player Mathew Tkachuk of the Florida Panthers had admitted, “There is hatred.”
Canada had won three Olympic golds, two of them over the U.S. in the final game, since the America’s most recent before Sunday came in 1980 at Lake Placid. In that Olympiad, Team USA’s “Miracle on Ice” victory over the mighty Soviet Union had happened 46 years to the day before Sunday changed everything.
On balance, Canada might still be on top of the rivalry.
But it’s the Americans now who are on top of the world and, until further notice, own the sport Canada invented.
The fact a Canadian team has not won the Stanley Cup championship since 1993 doesn’t say much about national supremacy in the sport since NHL rosters are a hodgepodge of nationalities.
Olympic gold medals say more.
The Panthers’ Tkachuk, on the heel of consecutive Stanley Cups, now has become the franchise’s first player to win a gold medal while playing for the Cats, the team’s only player on the ’26 U.S. roster.
Asking Tkachuk whether the Stanley Cup or Olympic gold “means more” is liking asking a mother of two which child she loves most.
But ask me and I would say Olympic gold, at least when NHL players are involved, as they were in Italy for the first time since 2014. The reason is simple: Country is bigger than team.
It’s why NHL fans across the United States were rooting for one team in Italy, one team on Sunday. It’s why the Divided States of America, fractured by politics and sharply disparate feelings about President Trump, united for Team USA. And the U.S. women also won it all in Italy, a first double gold for American hockey.
A touching moment in Sunday’s postgame on-ice celebration saw Tkachuk hold aloft a Team USA jersey with the number 13 and the name GAUDREAU on the back. Top U.S. player Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew were killed while biking in New Jersey in 2024 by an alleged impaired driver. He might have been on the ice Sunday. In a way, he still was, his parents, widow and two young children in the crowd.
As Team USA paid respects to the Gaudreaus and gold medals draped around American necks, you couldn’t help but feel the tectonic shift in the way the world will now view American hockey.
There had always been that one date and one only: Feb. 22, 1980. The Miracle on Ice. U.S. hockey as sport’s ultimate Cinderella story.
Now there is a second date: Feb. 22, 2026. This was th day U.S. hockey grew up, flexed its might, and announced it was Canada’s little brother no more.
