You may ask
yourself what inspired me to revisit a not entirely memorable, though worth
seeing at the time, sports movie about a great sports moment from 31 years ago.
It was actually seeing Warrior several weeks ago. Both films are directed by Gavin O’Connor and I was curious
to see how his nearly excellent sports film from this year compares to one from
7 years ago.
It is perhaps the greatest moment in the history of
sports. It at least makes the top five. The United States Olympic Men’s Hockey
team did the unfathomable by defeating the Soviet Union in the 1980 Lake Placid
Olympics. There is hardly a more galvanizing moment in American sports history
than that one, as 20 college-age amateur hockey players took to the ice and
brought down the behemoths, those mythical beasts of the USSR who were regarded
as the best hockey team in the world by far and had won the gold in the
previous four Olympic games. What most people forget or treat as an
afterthought just as Gavin O’Connor’s 2004 film Miracle does is that the US had to play and win a game against
Finland to take the gold medal. Beating the Soviets was a great moment, but it would
have fallen into the recesses of bittersweet memories of almost-made-its had
our boys not won that next game.
