I Still Believe

Forty years ago, the 22nd of February (a/k/a "George Washington's Birthday") fell on a Friday.  It was the final Friday of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.  That afternoon, the greatest ice hockey team in the world faced off against a ragtag bunch of college kids and their cranky old coach in the medal round, which the aforementioned greatest team in the world had annihilated, 10-3, at Madison Square Garden thirteen days earlier in each team's final pre-Olympics tune up. 

Way back when, Jim McKay hosted every Olympics, which aired on ABC.  When against all odds, Coach Herb Brooks and his American ragamuffins advanced to the medal round, for which they were rewarded with a rematch against Coach Victor Tikhonov's Soviet juggernaut, ABC wanted to broadcast the game in prime-time.  The Soviets refused.  Given that shortly before the Winter Olympics began, President Carter announced that American athletes would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow as a form of protest over the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviets' lack of cooperation was disappointing but not surprising. 

If you are younger than a certain age and belong to the "I must know everything at the moment it happens" generation, then the idea of an event of this magnitude not being shown live AND the idea that rather than killing ourselves to learn its result as soon as the game went final, millions of us simply gathered in front of our television sets (at 7:00 pm eastern time if memory serves) to watch the tape-delayed broadcast as if it was live is an anathema.  Yet, it is exactly what we did.  

I remember still sitting in the living room at our house in Neshanic Station, glued to the television set.  WPK, Sr. was an extraordinary ice hockey fan.  He loved the game and he understood it.  So, he appreciated the significance of Tikhonov's over-reaction to Tretiak, his best-on-the-planet goalie, allowing an absurdly cheap goal to Mark Johnson with one second left in the first period that knotted the game at 2-2, by pulling him from the net and gluing him to the bench for the remainder of the game.  

He also appreciated the significance of Tikhonov, whose team rarely trailed and never lost, never pulling his goaltender in favor of an extra attacker in the game's final minutes with the American team clinging to a 4-3 lead, courtesy of team captain Mike Eruzione's goal at the halfway point of the third period. 

I remember my father's reaction to the question Al Michaels famously asked as the game's final seconds counted down.  And I remember my own...

..."Yes!" 

Forty years later, I still believe. 

-AK