Sunday, February 28, 2010

Icy relations

First off, it seems trivial talking about today's huge gold medal between the U.S. and Canada without first giving our thoughts and prayers to those suffering in Chile after that 8.8-size earthquake hit yesterday. Our nations must provide aid and helping hands to those people in dire need. It surely won't be the last catastrophe and I'm hoping 2010 doesn't go down in history as the Year of the Earthquake.

All the way up the Pacific coast from Chile, an outstanding Winter Olympics prepares to close shop for four years, but not without first settling some serious stakes in the men's gold-medal hockey game. This is Canada's game and surely it will be watching to see whether Crosby and co. will claim yet another gold for the Maple Leaf. On the other hand, Americans see shades of "the Miracle on Ice" in this team and will no doubt be rooting for the Stars and Stripes to stick it to "America's Hat" in their sport on their ice. If the U.S. wins, it should lay claim to Vancouver Island and demand Canada cedes it to the U.S.

U.S. goaltender Ryan Miller has clearly been the story of this hockey tournament so far, but if Canada gets ahead early like it did against Russia, Miller's story ends here. Roberto Luongo has looked better than Brodeur and I think the energy of the home crowd will energize Canada to take this game. Canada will put a lot of traffic in front of Miller, so we'll see how the U.S. back line holds up.

I'm predicting Canada winning 4-3 after withstanding a late U.S. flurry. Either way, it should be a doozy.

2 comments:

Thumper said...

That was a great game... with the US falling behind 2-0 early, it looked like "game over", but they fought back to tie it with only seconds left to go in regulation, sending it to OT.

Ultimately, though, the Canadian onslaught won out. After all's said and done, one of the great games in Olympic hockey history.

dabo said...

Well, we should all say

Thank You, Canada!

That was one of the best Winter games ever held, a few sad stories but relatively controversy-free. They certainly raised the bar.

That was a great hockey game. Very evenly matched, either team could have won, it was Canada's day.

One of the things that was brought home for me this games was just how pointless medal counts are becoming. Congrats to all the athletes for whatever color medals they took away with them, of course.

But how many of them train and live outside their home countries? Or compete on teams from other than their home countries? And so on? Announcers or color commentators, at least here in the US, needed scorecards sometimes just to explain:

he's Swiss but skiing for Norway; he was born in Canada but competed for the US four years ago but is competing for Australia this year; when he's not competing for Team America he's right here playing for the Vancouver Canucks: on and on!

Go World!