All through the
Beijing Games, the unchecked swagger of Canada’s
women’s hockey team had been conspicuous for all to see — and to admire, fume
over and fear.
اضافة اعلان
There were the humiliations of the teams that would play for the
bronze medal, the edgy digs at rivals, the nuanced critiques of the failed
strategies to score on Ann-Renée Desbiens, the
goaltender who made the Canadian crease a fortress.
The Canadians proved Thursday that all of it was justified: They
overpowered the United States in the gold medal game, 3-2, and reclaimed the
Olympic crown that the Americans had wrested away four years ago.
Canada’s victory was a display of strong-armed, swarming play,
blended with a few doses of luck and an angsty, furious drive that started with
the Olympic loss in 2018.
The outcome was one that the Canadians had tiptoed toward
predicting. To them, a gold medal often seemed less about redemption and more
about simply meeting a ceaselessly high standard.
“We’ve been playing so well that when we do play our way — and
not focus on other teams or focus on who we’re playing — we are unstoppable,”
said Natalie Spooner, a forward on her third Canadian Olympic team.
Canada appeared to strike about seven minutes into Thursday’s
game, when American goaltender Alex Cavallini deflected a puck and saw Spooner
sweep it in with a powerful shot. The United States, though, challenged that
Canada had been offside, an assessment the officials upheld.
“I owe you one,” Spooner said teammate Sarah Nurse told her on
the bench. “I was offside.”
Thirty-five seconds later, the goal arrived: After Canada won a
face-off, Nurse took a pass, spun and scored.
Canada doubled its lead later in the period on a shot by
Marie-Philip Poulin, the Canadian captain who was playing in her fourth Games,
and pushed it to 3-0 when Poulin scored again midway through the second.
Hilary Knight scored a short-handed goal for the United States
late in the second, promising that the Americans would at least avoid the
indignity of being shut out when a gold medal was for the taking.
A power-play goal with 13 seconds to play made the final score
close. By then, though, the Canadian team knew its victory was assured.
So did the Americans.
“We wanted to just get a lot of pucks in there and actually have
a lot of bodies, and I don’t think we did enough of a great job of that,” U.S.
forward Abby Roque said.
Thursday’s spectacle was familiar ground, the sixth gold-medal
game between Canada and the United States since women’s hockey became an
Olympic sport in 1998. The United States captured the first Olympic title but
not another until 2018, when it won a game decided by a shootout that was seen,
at least in Canada, as an aberration, not a harbinger of a power shift.
Many of the meetings leading to Thursday’s game suggested as
much. The Canadians won a preliminary-round game in Beijing, 4-2, and posted a
4-2 record in a series of pre-Olympic exhibition games in North America.
The teams were the unquestioned titans of the Games. Entering
Thursday, Canada had scored 54 goals, an Olympic tournament record, and had
three women — Brianne Jenner, Sarah Fillier and Jamie Lee Rattray — among the
five top scorers in Beijing.
The United States had logged two shutout wins, and had twice
defeated Finland, which won the bronze medal Wednesday night.
Led by Kendall Coyne Schofield, the captain and one of the
world’s fastest skaters, and Knight, who Thursday set the American record for
most games played by a women’s hockey player at the Olympics, the United States
possessed a fearsome attack that forced rival goalies to confront a storm of
shots through the tournament.
But the Americans struggled again Thursday to turn chances into
goals. At the same time, they found a Canadian squad eager — and able — to
score quickly. In the first period, Canada tied the United States for shots,
with 11, a marked shift from their last meeting, when the Americans had 16
attempts in the first and the Canadians managed only five.
The United States eventually outpaced Canada in shots again,
calling to mind the Canadian judgment after their first meeting that the
Americans were all too happy to try to overwhelm opponents with a barrage of
shots that were not always good ones.
Still, it was a strategy that worked for most of the Games. But
as time faded Thursday, with the Americans scrambling to a final soundtrack of
clacking and hitting and emptying their net with more than three minutes to
play, it was clear which team had shown itself to be the better one.
Just as Canada had long asserted that it would.
Read More
Sports
.jpg)
.jpg)
