Lincicome: A gold medal in finding meaning in U.S. hockey’s win

Every four decades or so, hockey matters, an obligation taken seriously, giving hope to soccer and lacrosse, even pickleball, I suppose.

My point here is not that a game can make a nation feel good about itself, it is that it shouldn’t.

If national self-worth is tied to an auxiliary sport, then let’s start funding badminton and bowling while we still can.

None of this is to slight the game of ice hockey, well regarded in several places, some where ice is only used at happy hour.

Ice hockey is a difficult and incoherent activity, played with an invisible puck by interchangeable masked figures costumed in lumpy laundry and armed with crooked sticks, used only occasionally as weapons.

Success, then, is to be admired no matter the muddle and mayhem, although even those of us who were there for the first Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid still cannot explain icing without checking our manual.

This was not that, this Marvel in Milan, although it cannot escape the comparison to 1980, the last time anyone asked, why do they have two blue lines?

What is the difference between now and then? College kids beat the Soviet army to start with. Also, as unhappy as things might seem now, they were pretty miserable then. We had a “crisis of confidence,” according to that POTUS, who cared more and had a better vocabulary than this one.

A White House invitation was issued to the U.S. men’s team but, to be accurate, none to the women’s team. That is not because Jimmy Carter joked he might be impeached, but because there was no women’s hockey in the Olympics.

Women’s hockey was not included until 1998 in Nagano, where the U.S. won gold. U.S. women have medaled in every Games since, winning three golds, four silvers and a bronze, all to minimal hullabaloo.

And while we are at it, let us not ignore the fact that of the record winter haul by the U.S. in Milan/Cortina, women out-medaled the men 17 to 12 and out-gold-medaled them six to four. This is how it always is in the Winter Games.

Figure it this way, the Winter Olympics belong to women and Norwegians, so when anything breaks this familiar pattern, folks — including the press — go a little nuts.

Had the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team lost to Canada, as it usually does, or had it not medaled at all, little attention would have been paid. Certainly, the disappointment would not have matched the ruckus created by winning.

The chief memory of these Games — and it might still be — would have been figure skater Ilia Malinin botching his chance to prove he was everything everyone said he was. The curse of hype lurks for a chance that comes only once every four years.

The “Quad God” got more attention going in than any other American Olympian, and while the hockey players may now disperse to their main jobs as professionals, free to focus on the real hockey prize, the Stanley Cup, poor Quad God will always be recalled as slipping on the ice just like the rest of us.

The usual star of the Winter Games is the female figure skater, and for the first time in 24 years an American woman won the gold. That may seem puny compared to the 46-year hockey drought, but female figure skating was long dominated by U.S. women.

Alysa Liu not only won with an infectious joy and raccoon hair, but her teeth piercings were certainly more appealing than the toothless grin of hockey hero Jack Hughes.

Of all the other U.S. winners in Milan, most of whom will now recede into agate, none were as congratulated nor as celebrated as the men’s hockey team, which will, too, fade from the achievement, having filled their moment as props and proxies.

For now let us allow that it mattered. We can forgive the beer-chugging FBI director in the happy locker room. Goodness knows he has little reason to be happy. We can try not to cringe when the team is displayed in Congress as an extension of political whim.

This doesn’t happen very often. Or often enough.