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   LibertyDefender

   @LibertyDefender

   6:19 PM EST ⋅ Feb 22, 2020

   Excellent discussion of the dynamics of hockey play.  The Soviet Red Army team had played together so often for so long that each player knew intimately and instinctively each other player’s abilities, strengths, tendencies, preferences.  It’s literally incomprehensible how much better prepared the USSR team was than the ragtag bunch of college kids who spent maybe 5 months trying to learn how to play as a team.

   We obsessive types would love to see an even deeper dive.

   In the announcing booth with Al Michaels was Ken Dryden, All-American goalie at Cornell and longtime goalie for the Montreal Canadiens.  Starting at goalie for the USSR was Vladislav Tretiak, who had been goalie for the Red Army team since the 1969-70 season, when he was barely 18 years old.  It’s no stretch to say that in 1980 those were the two greatest goaltenders ever to play the game.

   Tretiak didn’t play after the first period, when he gave up two goals, the second coming with only 1 second remaining.  The Soviet team had left the ice, thinking that the period had ended.  When the officials required the USSR to take the ice for the final second, Tretiak did not return.  Instead, backup goalie Vladimir Myshkin entered and played the remainder of the game.

   In the third period, Mike Eruzione – who had just come off the bench – was open in the slot and while skating backwards, shot a wrist shot (“off the wrong foot, as he always did,” goalie Jim Craig would later say) past Myshkin with exactly 10:00 minutes remaining, for what would turn out to be the winning goal.

   The intensity of the American reaction to that goal is impossible to describe.  I was watching the game on the tape delayed broadcast in a college fraternity with 25 or 30 other college athletes.  We all knew what the final score was (even those of us who had tried to isolate ourselves from the news reports before the television broadcast).  Yet when that goal scored, the reaction was immediate and … dials turned to eleven.

   What some of us noticed was that immediately after that goal was scored, the Soviet team launched what has to be one of the most ferocious offensive atttacks ever, while the American fans hadn’t yet stopped to exhale.  In an ESPN interview later, Mike Eruzione described what we all felt (paraphrasing):

   I looked at the clock, ten minutes left.  So I stayed out there, skated hard for a full shift, came off the ice winded, sat on the bench and looked up at the clock:

   9:59

   The clock wouldn’t move!

   and

   As the minutes wound down, we kept wondering “when are they going to pull the goalie?” As it got down to seconds left, we finally realized – they didn’t know how!  They’d never been behind.

   Eight and a half months later Ronald Reagan was elected President.  God Bless America.