MILAN — When Team USA takes the ice against Team Canada at Santagiulia Arena in the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 on Sunday (8:10 a.m. ET; Peacock, NBC, ICE Tele, CBC Gem, CBC, SN [JIP], TSN [JIP], RDS), a gold medal will be at stake.
But forward Matthew Tkachuk, one of the emotional leaders for the U.S., said the game is not just about the 25 players who will be wearing the red, white and blue. It’s for everyone who calls America home.
“Anytime you’re in this position, you’re not playing for yourself, you’re playing for your country,” Tkachuk said Saturday. “You’re playing for the guys that have come before you. You’re playing for the generation that will be coming after that. Might not be hockey players or wanting to play hockey right now, but you never know, we could do something, hopefully special tomorrow, and there’s a new crop of athletes that want to be hockey players.
“That’s how it works with teams that have won in the past.”
The last United States team to win an Olympic gold medal in men’s hockey was the “Miracle on Ice” team at Lake Placid in 1980. That was a group of unknown college kids who somehow upset the Soviet Union, perhaps the greatest team ever assembled, on Feb. 22, 1980, exactly 46 years ago Sunday.
The U.S. then topped Finland to win the gold medal.
It was and still is one of the most incredible stories in the history of all sports, spawning several documentaries and a Disney feature-length film about the 25 players who won gold.
Twenty years earlier, 17 United States players took home gold at the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics.
