The Associated Press
Canada's Jayna Hefford (left) gets the puck past U.S. goalie Sara DeCosta with one second left in the second period to give the Canadians a 3-1 lead during Thursday's gold medal game.

U.S. women suffer power outage

Canada stymies USA's power play to win gold medal

Gannett News Service

Originally published Friday, February 22, 2002

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah -- United We Stand was the season-long theme for the American women's hockey team.

United they cried on Thursday night.

Team Canada, ignoring an 0-8 record against the Americans during the pre-Olympic tour, played a near-perfect game and withstood an endless string of questionable penalties to defeat Team USA 3-2 in the gold-medal game at the sold-out E Center.

"One and eight, let's celebrate, that was our rallying cry," said Canadian backup goalie Sami Jo Small.

With the loss, the dream season for Team USA came crashing down in the Wasatch Valley.

"It's pretty tough to listen to their national anthem in your home country," forward Jenny Potter said.

What was even tougher to handle was the way Canada played. Team USA went just 2-for-11 on the power play and was outshot 29-27. "We definitely can't take anything away from the way Canada played, they played their hearts out," American forward Julie Chu said.

All season -- through the 31-0 pre-Games tour and four blowout wins at the Salt Lake Olympics -- the Americans overcame any forechecking pressure a team threw at them. They overcame the pressure of one-on-one defensive coverage.

But when the faced the ultimate challenge, what they couldn't handle was the pressure of being expected to win the only game that mattered.

"We kept hearing about the 8-0 and U.S.-Canada for the gold medal, we should probably win, yeah, we felt it," said defenseman Lyndsay Wall, at 16 America's youngest athlete at the 2002 Winter Games.

Trailing 3-1 after the second period, Karyn Bye's goal with 3:33 to play cut the Canadian lead to one, but Team USA couldn't muster another scoring chance.

When the final buzzer sounded, the Canadian team poured off the bench, hurled gloves and sticks into the air and mobbed goalie Kim St.-Pierre.

At the same time, the Americans tried get out of the way, then make their way to console one another.

More misery followed, however. While awaiting the medal presentations, Team USA players were forced to stand at their blue line and watch their rivals dance with the Canadian flag.

Four years ago, the Americans partied on the Big Hat ice in Nagano, Japan, to chants of U-S-A!, U-S-A! On Thursday, shouts of CAN-A-DA, CAN-A-DA rang out through the E Center.

"That was hard to go through, you always want to be the ones celebrating," forward Katie King said. "Then you remind yourself you have the silver medal, and that's not too shabby."

On the Web:

The Olympian Copyright 2002

back to Salt Lake 2002 index