The Miracle on Ice

Now let me tell you what happened in that little arena back in the village, because it's one of the greatest stories in all of American sport, and it happened right here in Lake Placid.

The year is 1980, February, the Winter Olympics. And the world is a cold and frightened place — the Cold War is at its iciest, America and the Soviet Union staring each other down across the globe. And the Soviet hockey team? They were not just good. They were the greatest team the sport had ever seen — grown men, professionals in everything but name, who had crushed the world for years and beaten a squad of NHL all-stars like they were children. Unbeatable. Everyone knew it.

And across the ice from them stood the American team — a bunch of college kids. Amateurs. Their average age was about twenty-one. Nobody, and I mean nobody, gave them a prayer.

But on the night of the twenty-second, in front of a screaming home crowd right here in this mountain village, those kids played the game of their lives. They fell behind, and they clawed back. And with ten minutes to go, their captain knocked in the goal that put them ahead, four to three — and then those twenty-one-year-olds hung on, and hung on, while the whole arena counted down and the greatest team on earth threw everything they had at a wall of American college boys who would not break.

And as the final seconds ticked away, the announcer on live television screamed the words that every American of a certain age can still recite: 'Do you believe in miracles? YES!' They won. These kids beat the unbeatable Soviets. The place came apart. Grown men wept. A whole anxious country, for one night, felt ten feet tall.

They went on to win the gold two days later, but it's that one impossible night everyone remembers — the Miracle on Ice. And it happened right down there, in a town of twenty-five hundred souls in the Adirondack mountains. Chew on that as you drive: sometimes the kids beat the giants. Sometimes miracles are real.