Chris Jones reports from Milan.
There are two kinds of inevitabilities: The ones that give you comfort, and the ones that give you dread.
For Canada’s women’s hockey team, the fact that they were going to face the U.S. in the gold-medal game was the right kind of foregone conclusion.
For all the progress that’s been made in the women’s game, there remain levels to it. When Canada beat Switzerland 2-1 in Monday’s semifinal, it felt more like a formality than a victory, as close as the score was. The Canadians, winners of five gold medals and two silvers in seven previous Olympics, did what they had to do.
That was even truer for the fearsome, heavily favoured Americans, who easily dispatched the Swedes 5-0 earlier in the afternoon on the same ice.
Now comes the sort of inevitability that requires conquering.
Canada to play the U.S. for Olympic women’s hockey gold after squeaking by Swiss in the semis
Canada, which was worse than the U.S. in every possible way in a 5-0 loss in the preliminary round, has 72 hours to find the belief that Thursday’s final will have a different result — that they can somehow beat an American team that’s younger, faster, meaner, stronger.
“It’s a 60-minute game,” captain Marie-Philip Poulin said, imagining what she will tell her teammates before they take the ice. “For us, as a group, it’s going to be all about us, all about our heart.”
Poulin missed the ugly preliminary loss with a knee injury. She will play in the final, and her presence will no doubt change the balance at least a little: She scored both goals against the Swiss, breaking Hayley Wickenheiser’s record for the most at the Olympics with her first.
“So clutch,” Renata Fast said. “She shines in moments like this, but it’s the work she puts in every single day that allows her to do it.”
She won’t be able to do it alone against the Americans.
They are a scarifying team, the monster under this tournament’s bed. They have scored at least five goals in every game in Milan and allowed exactly one, in their opening game against Czechia. They’ve since gone more than 331 minutes without giving up a goal while scoring whenever they’ve decided they probably should.
Americans advance to Olympic women’s hockey final with shutout win over Sweden
U.S. forward Taylor Heise was asked, before she knew that the Americans would in fact meet the Canadians once again, whether beating a team in the preliminary round gave her even more confidence than she might have otherwise.
“Nothing matters,” Heise said. “It’s the gold-medal game. Everyone’s going to show up, and if they don’t, they’re not meant to be there.”
The Canadians, publicly, are saying something similar.
“Every gold-medal game is a fight, it’s a bloodbath,” Fast said. “You’re competing for Olympic gold. Who cares what the past was?”
But if Canada holds a single advantage over the U.S., it’s history, it’s experience. Poulin has played in five Olympics. The U.S. has seven players still in college, including Abbey Murphy, the breakout star of the tournament and one of its principal villains, with a knack for the game’s darker arts.
Canadian head coach Troy Ryan has said that he doesn’t want his players to try to match Murphy’s rat streak unless they can beat her with it.
They can’t. Nor can Ryan hope to close the speed gap that exists between the two teams by Thursday. It might take years to make those corrections. Canada’s women outshot the Swiss 46-8 but made things nervier than they should have been, suffering long stretches when they were slow, shaky, and imprecise.
If they try to beat the Americans at their own game, they will lose. That is a certainty.
But maybe, especially with Poulin back in the lineup, they can find their counter.
They were timid in their first game. Not that. They should be brave without being open or reckless. They should be calm, and they should be patient. Mostly, they should be wise in their management of time, space, the puck, and their temper.
“The gold medal is going to be a battle,” Laura Stacey said. “Today, giving it our all, battling, finding a gritty win — that’s what the next game’s going to be like. I think this can give us some confidence that we’re going to be able to do that.”
If they can, they’ll have a chance to perform a kind of magic trick: Minute by minute, shift by shift, they can take the pressure they’re feeling and put it in American chests. They can slow down the game and make younger minds race.
They can exchange dread for comfort.
They can trade one inevitability for another.
