Ray Kowalczyk called me at quarter to seven this morning to ask if I was watching tonight. Ray, I said, the only thing that’s going to keep me from watching tonight is if the cable goes out, and if the cable goes out I’m driving to the Elks. He said he’d save me a stool. That’s how you know it’s a real game. Nobody calls me at quarter to seven about the Pro Bowl.
Tonight in Milano Cortina the United States women’s hockey team plays Canada for the gold medal, which is the seventh or eighth time those two countries have played each other for the gold medal, and I have not been bored by it once. These women have been trying to put each other through the boards since roughly 2002. There is no press tour. There is no podcast pivot. There is no sit-down with a sideline reporter who wants to know about their morning routine. They have one routine, and it is going to a freezing building in Calgary or Plymouth and skating into another human being at full speed.
The Americans have Hilary Knight, who I’m fairly certain has been on every Olympic roster since they let women in the building, and a goaltender who looks like she’s annoyed the puck was even shot at her. The Canadians have Marie-Philip Poulin, who has scored a gold-medal-winning goal so many times it’s basically her job description on her tax return. These are players. These are not personalities with a Cameo account. I checked.
You want to know what’s going to be different about tonight than the football game I sat through ten days ago? Nobody is going to pause the third period so a country artist can ride in on a horse. There is no sponsor read in the middle of a power play. The broadcast is not going to cut away from a two-on-one to show you a celebrity in a luxury box pretending to understand icing. When somebody scores, the camera will stay on the player who scored. I know. Wild concept.
Coach DiMaggio, may he rest, used to tell us that the only sport worth watching was one where you could hear the players breathing. He meant football, but he would’ve made an exception. He saw the ’98 women’s gold medal game on a tube TV at the union hall and didn’t get up to use the bathroom for two and a half hours. I asked him what he thought afterward. He said, “Those girls hit harder than my J.V.” Coming from him that was the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Here’s the thing the league guys still don’t understand about why this works. The women’s game is technically not a checking sport, which means the entire game is players finding extremely creative ways to check each other and the refs pretending not to notice. Hip into the boards? Incidental. Shoulder to the chin in front of the net? She was just standing there. It is the most violent polite sport on earth. You cannot fake that. You cannot manufacture that in a focus group at the league office.
Petey Corrigan’s granddaughter plays travel hockey out by the rink in Glens Falls. Twelve years old, weighs about as much as a goalie pad. Petey says she watches the U.S. team highlights on a loop and has started practicing her own celebration. The celebration is just pointing at her dad. That’s it. That’s the whole celebration. No phone. No flossing. No whatever the kids on TikTok are doing this week. She points at her dad, and her dad points back, and that is the entire transaction. I would watch eight hours of that.
The game is on tonight at a time the league will tell you and not a minute earlier, because the IOC schedules things the way my insurance company schedules surgeries. Set a reminder. Tell your kid to put the phone down for two hours. If the Canadians win again I will be insufferable until Friday and if the Americans win I will pretend I was confident the whole time. Either way you are going to watch a sport that hasn’t yet figured out how to ruin itself, and you should enjoy that while it lasts.
Ray’s coming over. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a cookbook her sister gave her, which is the first time in eight months a recipe in this house hasn’t come from a podcast, and that alone feels like a small win for the country.