Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (50 page)

Such a waste of time and energy. They lost because, as they openly admitted, they weren't good enough. Unlike Nagano in 1998, when a loss to the Czech Republic in a shootout sent Canadian hockey into a spin with demands for a complete makeover of Canadian hockey, it's pretty hard to get worked up when Canada hasn't lost so much as a game in the world junior championship in two years.

Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson also met with the
media to assure Canadians there is no need for a royal commission on hockey. “We don't have to tear our game apart,” he said. “We have to continue to work hard.”

Nor, he suggested, is there need of another snap election to decide the next leader of the country—when it comes to something that matters far more than politics. Executive director Wayne Gretzky, the architect of the team that failed, is welcome to stay for as long as he wishes. “Hockey Canada needs Wayne Gretzky,” Nicholson said.

At the same time, Nicholson conceded that the results in Turin had been disastrous for the Canadians. Shut out in three games. Seventeen power plays without a goal. A team that never came together in any sense. “It just wasn't their tournament,” he said.

And yet, even with Canada out of it, it was still in some ways Canada's tournament—simply because of losing. As the Finns and Swedes and Czechs and Russians came to practise for their semifinal matches, the players were besieged with questions that often had far more to do with what went wrong for Canada than what must go right tonight to put them into Sunday's gold medal game.

Sometimes the players even volunteered to look back rather than look ahead. Tournament sensation Alexander Ovechkin, the twenty-year-old Russian who scored the goal that put Canada out, joked that his agent, Don Meehan, wouldn't be coming to watch the final games because “he's at home, probably wondering what happened to his Canada.”

When that caught the media's attention and the Canada questions began, Ovechkin tried to move on. “Right now” he said, “we have to forget about this game with Canada.”

It would not, however, be that simple. Was the problem the big ice, players were asked, Europeans having grown up on it and North Americans having to adapt to it? “I don't see it as an advantage,” Swedish forward Daniel Alfredsson answered. He prefers the smaller North American ice. Maybe, suggested Czech star Jaromir Jagr. “It's a different game. You skate more on the big
ice and you have to be smart. If you have a chance, you go for it. If not, sit back and preserve energy.”

Canadian coaches Quinn and Ken Hitchcock both repeatedly said their team had to forget they were on the big ice and play “the Canadian game.” It didn't work. When Nicholson and his staff get together to “reassess,” as promised, one question they will have to ask is whether this is intelligent strategy. The Canadian game, it seems, simply does not translate to the larger ice surface.

Is it, then, that the Europeans care so much more about the Olympics than they do about the Stanley Cup? Again, Alfredsson, the captain of the Ottawa Senators, shook his head. “The No. 1 trophy for me to win would be the Stanley Cup. No question. It's so much harder to win.”

Eventually the questions and answers were forced to the real story at hand: the four remaining teams and their chances of winning the gold medal. “I think the Russians have the best team,” Jagr said.

So too does everyone else. And yet, as the Canadians found—apologies for returning to the past—hockey is also a game of lucky bounces, bad bounces and unexpected whistles. The phrase “anything can happen” was used so many times in the mixed zone it hardly requires attribution. “You've got to have some luck and some great goaltending,” said Swedish coach Bengt-Ake Gustafsson, “especially at the right time.”

While goaltending is always pivotal, it's intriguing that goaltending has been a question for all four of the remaining teams—whereas goaltending was the only non-issue for Canada. The Finns did not have Mikka Kiprusoff, but Antero Niittymaki has been sensational. The Czechs were counting on Dominik Hasek, but injury has put third goalie Milan Hnilicka in the spotlight. Russia's top goaltender is supposed to be Nikolai Khabibulin, but he didn't come and Evgeni Nabokov has been superb. The Swedes traditionally lack good goaltending, but Henrik Lundqvist has been fine.

Sweden will play the Czech Republic in today's first game, and the Czechs are slight favourites. Though they lost 3–2 to Canada in a meaningless earlier game, the Czechs completely dominated play when it struck their fancy. The Swedish players, several of whom play in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver, are hoping that Canadian fans will now switch loyalties.

“I hope they're cheering for us,” said Mats Sundin, who is also captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs. “We'll take any support we can—we're going to need it.”

In the later game, Finland against Russia, the Russians have to be the heavy favourites, given the way such youngsters as Ovechkin, Ilya Kovalchuk and Evgeni Malkin are playing. “That team is scary one-on-one,” said Finnish forward Ville Nieminen. “We must take away their time and space—and excitement.”

“Obviously, they have more talent and more skills than we do,” Finnish star Teemu Selanne said, “but there is only one puck.”

One puck and one game.

And the secret to winning that one game is so simple, young Ovechkin said, that it says as much about the Canadian disaster as anything: “Score more goals.”

In a surprise outcome, Sweden and Finland met in the final, with Sweden claiming the gold medal. The great Russian team also sputtered when it mattered. Wayne Gretzky declined to be involved with the selection of the 2010 Canadian team, handing over the job to his friend Steve Yzerman
.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

H
e says he did not even see it, though he had dreamed of that exact moment “a thousand times growing up.” The overtime winner in the most important hockey game of a lifetime—in this case, the gold medal game in Olympic men's hockey that gave Team Canada a 3–2 victory over a stubborn Team USA.

Sidney Crosby took the shot—the scoresheet will say the country's heart both stopped and started up again at the 7:40 mark of overtime—and suddenly Canada had gold. “I didn't see it go in the net,” said Crosby. “I just heard everyone screaming. Every kid dreams of that opportunity—it could have been anyone else.”

Not likely. Though Crosby had been effectively checked in games against Russia and Slovakia, as well as for most of this game, there was always a sense that he would be most likely to rise to the occasion if occasion presented itself.

This winning goal will now stand with the ones scored by Paul Henderson, hero of the 1972 Summit Series, and Mario Lemieux, hero of the 1987 Canada Cup and, coincidentally, Crosby's landlord in Pittsburgh. He will be forever known by it, the ultimate highlight—though he is still only twenty-two—of what has already become a fairy tale on ice for the shy, soft-spoken youngster from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia.

His linemate, Jarome Iginla, says Crosby was screaming himself just before the goal.
“Iggy! Iggy!”
Iginla said he heard from the corner, where he was attempting to protect the puck against the boards. “There are different pitches to a yell,” said Iginla. “Sounded pretty urgent so I figured he was open—I was just hoping I wasn't too late.”

He was not too late. The pass came to Crosby and the shot he never saw squeaked through the pads of Team USA goaltender Ryan Miller to cap a remarkable week that saw Canadian doubts
turned to Canadian delirium—no moment cheered so wildly as Crosby's fairy-tale goal.

One week earlier, the Canadians had lost 5–3 to the United States in the preliminary round, and it had seemed this game that fate might be working against the Canadians, as they hit posts twice in the third period and Crosby, on a clear breakaway, was caught by the USA's tiny Patrick Kane, who had outshone Crosby in the tournament and set up both American goals.

Kane, the twenty-one-year-old Buffalo native who plays for the Chicago Blackhawks, was left in tears when it was over and Crosby's earlier struggles in the game were instantly forgotten. For Miller, who was named the tournament's most valuable player, it was a crushing moment of defeat. Asked how he felt, he responded only “I feel like shit” and walked away.

Crosby, on the other hand, was jubilant, piled on by his teammates and glassy-eyed as the gold medals were awarded and the Team Canada players locked arms for the singing of the national anthem and the raising of the Canadian flag.

The cheers for Crosby were so loud that International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge had to pause for several seconds before placing the gold medal around the Canadian hero's neck. “There's nothing that kid can't do—or hasn't done,” said twenty-one-year-old Jonathan Toews, Canada's top forward, of Crosby. Toews and Corey Perry also scored for Canada.

Crosby refused to be drawn into a choice between the Stanley Cup, which he led his Pittsburgh Penguins to last spring, and the Olympic gold. “I wouldn't put one ahead of the other,” he said. But he added that, for his teammates and himself, there was “a ton of pride” in being able to bring home Canada's fourteenth gold medal at these Games, which the players knew would mark a new Olympic record.

Canadian defenceman Chris Pronger, who also won gold in men's hockey at Salt Lake City in 2002, said this one was far more special—“because it's on home soil.”

The American team had forced overtime after pulling Miller for an extra attacker and scoring with only twenty-five seconds left in regulation play. After Crosby's goal, the American players stood around in shock and wept while the Canadians littered the ice with their gloves and sticks and helmets and jumped into each other's arms.

“It stings,” said Zach Parise, who scored the final-minute tying goal and is the son of J.P. Parise, who played in the '72 Series. “It's a fitting finish for Canadian fans.”

Nervous Canadians were relieved by the victory, but so too was Canadian goaltender Roberto Luongo, playing doubly at home in that he is the goaltender for the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League. Luongo, long held to be Canada's top netminder, has also long had a reputation of coming up short in important games. When the Americans scored in the dying seconds, it seemed possible that reputation might be cemented here this day. But it was not to be, thanks to the heroics of Iginla and Crosby.

“I've got a gold medal around my neck,” said a smiling Luongo. “Nobody can take it away from me.”

As for Crosby, even after the medals and the anthem and several interviews, he was still stunned by what had happened out there on the ice. “It doesn't even feel real,” he said. “It feels like a dream.”

But it is real. And it was also a dream.

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA

T
wo o'clock in the morning, Duke Street in downtown Halifax, and nothing but the flicker of a cigarette lighter to show off a gold medal. It may never have shone brighter.

The Russian teenagers walked the snow-choked streets below the Citadel until the early hours of Monday morning following their world junior hockey championship victory over Canada. They smoked cigarettes, some of them walked a bit unsteadily, and they periodically yelled out in English—“Gold! Gold! Gold!”—while lifting their medals from their chests to show all who happened to drive or stumble by.

There were no hard feelings. There was, instead, a congratulatory air about the streets, as if the kids and the city and the game itself had won—and no one at all had lost.

What a difference a year makes. Eleven months ago in Salt Lake City, the Canadian men's and women's hockey teams won Olympic gold. Had they not, and had the Canadian juniors come here and failed to win, not having won this tournament since 1997, there would likely be a few wringing hands today over the state of Canadian hockey. But not this time.

Out of the Olympics came a refreshing confidence in Canadian hockey and a new, and deep, appreciation for the way other countries have taken to the national sport. “Canada gave the world this wonderful game,” says Art Berglund, Team USA's director of player personnel, “but the rest of the world now plays it, too.”

They do indeed. The Russians won because they had the necessary skill and size, but they did not win by much. The Canadian juniors, also highly skilled and swift, put up a wonderful battle. The Canadians, like the Russians, went five games straight
without a loss in this extraordinary tournament, and they went into the third period of the gold medal final with a 2–1 lead, only to lose 3–2 in a game that could easily have gone either way but for a goalpost, a missed check, a lost opportunity. The two teams that fought for the bronze medal—Finland winning by the same tight 3–2 score over the United States—might have reached the final as well but for some other momentary tick of a puck. The six other teams in the tournament all showed, at times, remarkable skill.

The fans obviously adored it. The combined attendance totals for Halifax and Sydney set a new world junior championship record of 242,173—breaking previous records that had also been set here in Canada (173,453 in Winnipeg in 1999 and 148,632 in Hamilton back in 1986). Obviously, Canadian fans like their junior hockey. Such an undeniable national embrace of the junior international game cannot help, at this particular time, to contrast with what is obviously less enthusiasm shown for the overpriced professional product.

“It's the purity of the game,” says former Canadian Hockey Association president Murray Costello. “These kids aren't yet spoiled.”