By Bob Markus



Vince Lombardi notwithstanding, history tells us there can be victory in defeat. Dunkirk comes to mind. The United States Olympic hockey team, circa 2010, seconds the notion. Thirty years after a plucky team of amateurs pulled off the biggest upset in Olympic history, a squad of gritty professionals did it again. And this time they didn't even have to win the game.



One of the glorious aspects of the Olympics, winter or summer, is that you don't have to take home a gold medal to be a winner. Sometimes a silver or even a bronze can bring just as much joy. No one who watched Sunday's gold medal game could have come away with any other conclusion than that this was a second Miracle on Ice. The USA's 3-2 overtime loss to Canada might not have brought on as great a feeling of exhileration as did 1980's defeat of Russia's Big Red Army hockey machine. But it came close.



The U.S. team may have accepted its silver medals with bowed heads, but certainly with no sense of shame. I can't help comparing their demeanor with that of another Silver medal winning U.S. team--the 1972 Olympic basketball team. That team was so incensed by the bizarre officiating that gave Russia two mulligans, and ultimately the victory, in the final three seconds of the championship game that it refused to accept the silver medals. I covered that game for The Chicago Tribune and in my lead called it "the greatest three second violation in the history of basketball." I could sympathize with the players, but I could not agree with them. To many Americans it was a gesture of righteous indignation. To much of the rest of the world it was typical American hubris.



Although I consider myself as patriotic as the next guy and was rooting for the U.S. to win the game, I can't help but wonder if Sidney Crosby's game-winning shot wasn't the perfect ending. Certainly, Canada had a far greater emotional investment in its hockey team than did we Americans. It's THEIR game and they feel as strongly about it as we do about basketball. To prove it, Sunday's game was the most watched TV show in Canadian history. A lot of Americans watched it, too, but not as many as watched the 1980 games against Russia in the semi-final and Finland in the finals. Interest in hockey appears to be waning in this country, which is precisely why the NHL closed shop for two weeks to allow its star players to participate in Vancouver. If Sunday's thrilling climax doesn't give the game a boost I don't know what will.



Hockey as a sport has a couple of strikes against it. First of all, if you want to play it you have to know how to ice skate. That eliminates about half the world right there. Then, too, hockey does not translate well to the television screen. The puck, which is hard to see when you attend a game in person, is all but invisible on the screen. In fact, the one advantage the home viewer has over the fan in the arena is the ability of instant replay to show how a goal was scored. Before hockey became my fulltime beat in my final two years at The Tribune, I confess I hardly ever saw a goal being scored. The game is too fast, the puck too small, and my eyes too weak. I found, however, that when I watched hockey 100 nights a year I could train myself to concentrate on the puck and as soon as I learned the proper terminology I could report with some assurance that Jeremy Roenick had gone top shelf on Patrick Roy or that Chris Chelios had slipped one through the five hole on Martin Brodeur.

As often happens in life, a set of circumstances beyond my control led to my getting the hockey assignment. Having already covered most of the major beats at one time or another, I was at that stage of life where my main ambition was to be invisible. I never went into the office because there was no need to do so. If they wanted me they knew my phone number. I spent my days hoping the phone wouldn't ring, especially during Jeopardy. Then one day the phone rang. Wayne Gretzky was in town with the Los Angeles Kings and our beat writer who was supposed to do a story on "The Great One" had called in sick. Although they didn't expect me to talk to Gretzky himself at this late date perhaps I could get out to The Stadium and talk to Blackhawk goalie Eddie Belfour about what made Gretzky Gretzky. Eddie gave me some pretty good stuff and there is some irony in this because after I took over the beat the volatile goal tender and I did not always see eye to eye. It turned out that the beat writer was having some domestic difficulties, with his frequent absences due to road trips at the crux of the situation. So I finished out the season, including the playoffs, as the hockey writer. I soon discovered that hockey players were easier to get along with than some other professional athletes. The other writers on the beat seemed to be good guys, which is important. Most people don't realize it, but, as a sports writer, your best friends are not the guys in the office whom you never see. Rather, it's the beat writers from the rival papers with whom you spend so much time on the road. Sure, I have friends at The Tribune, but none any closer to me than Joe Goddard, who covered baseball for the Sun-Times when I was a Tribune baseball writer. After considering all of this I asked for, and got, the Blackhawk beat. It was a good two years. The Blackhawks were still selling out The Stadium every night and they made the playoffs both years I covered. They got to the conference finals that first year, losing to the Detroit Red Wings in a dramatic series where, it seemed, every game went at least one overtime and Belfour stood on his head nightly in a valiant, but doomed, effort to reach the Stanley Cup finals. By that time Eddie and I were not speaking to each other. When you're covering a hockey team and the No.1 goalie won't talk to you, that's not a good thing. Eddie came around a little bit when we discovered a mutual love for auto racing and we got along O.K. until I interviewed him for a story I was doing on backup goal tender Jeff Hackett. Hackett had been playing pretty well whenever he got the opportunity and my lead suggested that the Hawks now had two No.1 goal keepers and you could call them One and One-A. Belfour went bonkers when he read that and we were back to square one.

Roenick was one of my favorite players, a go to guy, as we say. He was always good for a juicy quote and from what I've read he hasn't changed much. It was strange to see him on Sunday's telecast, rendered nearly speechless by the amazing game taking shape in front of him. But that's what this game was, a stunner, and it doesn't matter who you were rooting for, because there were no losers in this game. Only winners.