Left, the 1980 American hockey victory over the Soviets. (www.olympic.org)

By Patrick Lynn

The United States Hockey team beat the Russians Saturday 3-2 in the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

One of my first memories involves the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. I knew nothing about the game since I was only seven and we weren’t a “hockey family”: my dad was a bitter laid- off factory worker and my mom barely made enough money to feed us boys by waiting tables at an Irish pub in Milwaukee. There was no money for hockey skates, much less hockey lessons. Life was tough.

In November of 1979 I sat in the front seat of my dad’s Chevy Nova for nearly an hour waiting for our turn at the gas pump. My dad didn’t talk much in those days, I think, because he was embarrassed for having lost his proud place as breadwinner for the family. He blamed the Communists for our lot in life as well as our neighbor’s similar troubles, and often reminded me the Soviet Union- the only enemy nation with nuclear capability at the time- could wipe us all out with one big nuclear blast.

As we sat in that Nova, still six cars out from the gas pump, breaking news came over the car radio about the Iranian takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran. More than 60 fellow citizens were now in danger of losing their lives. My old man saw an attack on the embassy as an attack on America itself, and I wouldn’t see him as upset again until 9/11.  By the time we’d reached the gas pump and my dad realized he had to shell out $0.86 center per gallon he was seething- now the Iranians were just as much to blame as the Russians for attacking the American way of life.

So we watched the U.S. Hockey Team play the Russians on Friday, Feb 22, 1980 with all the intensity and attention usually devoted for a movie theater. Despite not knowing anything about the game of hockey himself, my dad wouldn’t’ allow any noise during game play, and it wasn’t until the first commercial break when we took the dog outside for his evening constitutional that we realized every house in the neighborhood was watching in similar nature. The entire block was deafeningly silent: dozens of homes had company, evidenced by overflowing driveways and front yards filled with cars, but no sounds of laughter and music associated with a party, no cars driving in the street and no outside activity of any kind. It was very unusual for 7:30 on a Friday night, even in February, to have every human individual gathered around a television set as though tomorrow’s events depended on what events unfolded over the tube.

When the game ended with a 4-3 some three hours later, that silence was broken with a massive, simultaneous eruption of cheers and tears of joy in our house. My mother cried with joy and for the first time in over a year I saw my father’s shoulders relax, make a fist and mumble, “We finally got the Commies!”

The cheering had spilled out of neighboring homes down our street in Milwaukee. We heard fireworks from someone’s yard several blocks away. Men cheered and kissed their wives and a few young kids like myself joined the cheering, excited with the victory but unaware of the meaning behind a simple hockey game. It didn’t matter our team hadn’t yet won the gold- we beat the Russians. It was the shot in the arm our nation desperately needed, after watching the depressing television pleas from President Carter asking us to turn down our thermostats in the face of the latest oil crisis. Now we had secured and redefined our strength and the American way of life by beating a team few others ever had, and we did it with a group of college students who had only been playing together for some seven months. The Soviets had played together for years.

34 years later, America repeated that victory over the Russians, but this time, the feeling was different. The game just wasn’t as magical, nor did it hold the same weight in terms of national solidarity. There have been no string of crises leveling the playing field for our nation’s citizens, and foreign enemies aren’t defined by their nationality anymore.

Still, watching Plover native Joe Pavelski score against a country many of us grew up fearing did stir some of those feelings of national pride, a bit of local ownership in the outcome, if you will, because a man who graduated from the same high school as many of us did was in part one reason we won the game.

It was a fantastic game. The players were fantastic, the crowd was enthusiastic and the outcome was quite a crowd-pleaser. But you can’t compare the rematch with what happened in 1980. And I’m quite certain anybody who wasn’t born in time to see the 1980 game could never understand that. In 1980, Americans pinned their future hopes and dreams on those 20 young men. It wasn’t just a game.