Yesterday, exactly 46 years after the “Miracle on Ice,” the United States men’s hockey team won Olympic gold for the first time since 1980.
Jack Hughes scored in overtime to defeat Canada 2-1 in Milan, ending a drought that included two painful losses to Canada in Olympic gold-medal games—in 2002 at Salt Lake City and Sidney Crosby’s famous overtime winner in 2010 at Vancouver.
Canada had also beaten the Americans just last year in the 4 Nations Face-Off final.
Yesterday’s win was enormous. Historic. But the 2026 team was stacked with NHL superstars playing at the highest level. It could have gone either way.
The real miracle happened in 1980, when a 42-year-old coach named Herb Brooks stood before a team of college kids and told them something that seemed absurd: “You were born to be here.”
What almost nobody remembers is that Brooks himself was born to be somewhere else entirely. (Some of this story was dramatized in the 2004 film Miracle, but the core facts are exactly as remarkable in real life.)
Twenty years earlier, he’d been the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. Olympic team—the team that went on to win gold at Squaw Valley.
Here’s the irony: Olympic rosters in 1960 were capped at 17 players. Today they carry 20. If modern roster rules had been in place, Brooks almost certainly would have made the team.
And the Miracle on Ice might never have happened.
6 months of torture
The rejection haunted Brooks. When he got the coaching job for 1980, he carried the memory of being cut like a wound. Every decision he made—every brutal practice, every psychological test, every impossible demand—was filtered through the lens of that failure. He wanted to rewrite history, one skate drill at a time.
When Brooks took over Team USA in 1979, he told the selection committee: “I don’t want the best players. I want the right ones.”
He backed it up.
Brooks shocked hockey observers with his roster choices. He deliberately mixed bitter college rivals—especially players from Minnesota and Boston University—and then positioned himself as the common enemy.
What followed was six months of systematic torture.
Brooks studied Soviet training methods but went further, borrowing ideas from track and swimming coaches—concepts that were foreign to American hockey. Then came the infamous “Herbies”: full-ice sprints repeated until players vomited and collapsed.
After a lackluster exhibition tie against Norway, Brooks forced the team back onto the ice for forty-five minutes of Herbies in the dark after arena staff turned off the lights. Forward Dave Silk later called it the turning point: “That moment probably had more to do with us gelling as a team, feeling like we were a group, a family.”
Brooks believed suffering together would forge the chemistry required to beat the Soviets.
He was right.
Do you believe in miracles?
To understand why, remember one crucial detail: in 1980, NHL players were not allowed in the Olympics. The Americans were true amateurs—college kids, mostly. The Soviets, meanwhile, were “amateurs” in name only: state-sponsored professionals who trained and played together year-round.
It wasn’t just David versus Goliath. It was David versus a full-time machine.
The Soviet team hadn’t lost an Olympic game in twelve years. Just thirteen days earlier, they had crushed these same Americans 10-3 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden.
But on February 22, 1980, the impossible happened.
The Americans fell behind. Came back. Fell behind again. Came back again. With ten minutes left, Mark Pavelich fed Mike Eruzione, who beat legendary Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak.
4-3, United States.
ABC announcer Al Michaels delivered the call that still echoes today: “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”
Brooks didn’t celebrate. He slipped away to a bathroom and cried.
He knew what it felt like to be cut. Now he had given these kids what he never got.
The 18th player
Two days later, the Americans beat Finland to secure the gold medal.
After the Olympics, captain Mike Eruzione stunned everyone by retiring at twenty-five. NHL teams wanted him. He could have played professionally. But he walked away.
“How can you top that?” he said. “The last game I played, I won.”
Herb Brooks died in a car accident in 2003 at age sixty-six. All twenty members of the 1980 team served as his pallbearers.
Yesterday in Milan, when Hughes scored in overtime to give the United States its first Olympic gold in men’s hockey since 1980, Team USA players held up a jersey honoring Johnny Gaudreau, the late NHL star who likely would have been on the roster.
It was a beautiful moment. But back in 1980, nobody expected anything. Nobody believed.
Nobody thought a team of college kids could beat the best team in the world.
Nobody except the man who’d been cut.
The 18th player. The one who shouldn’t have been there.
The miracle was that Brooks convinced them they could—because he knew exactly what it felt like to be told you weren’t good enough.
7 optimistic moments from history this week
Sunday, February 22: “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world.”— Premier Zhou Enlai greeting President Richard Nixon at Beijing Airport, on the eve of Nixon becoming the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949.
Monday, February 23: “All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true.— Future Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini) describing Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printed Bible, completed in Mainz, Germany around February 23, 1455.
Tuesday, February 24: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”— Chief Justice John Marshall writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, decided February 24, 1803. This landmark case established the principle of judicial review—the power of courts to strike down laws that violate the Constitution.
Wednesday, February 25: “I shook up the world! I’m the greatest!”— Cassius Clay shouting to reporters after defeating heavyweight champion Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Hall on February 25, 1964. The 22-year-old Clay was an 8-to-1 underdog (43 of 46 sportswriters picked Liston to win).
Thursday, February 26: “It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world. Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness.”**— President Theodore Roosevelt on the Grand Canyon, which on February 26, 1919 became protected from development under U.S. law.
Friday, February 27: “This amendment is in character and phraseology precisely similar to the Fifteenth. For each the same method of adoption was pursued. One cannot be valid and the other invalid.” — Justice Louis Brandeis writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in *Leser v. Garnett*, decided February 27, 1922, ruling that the 19th Amendment enrosing the right of women to vote did not violate the rest of the Constitution.
Saturday, February 28: “We have found the secret of life.”— Francis Crick announcing to patrons at The Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, on February 28, 1953 that Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Crick had determined the double-helix structure of DNA.
Tretiak had been pulled after the first period. The last two,goals were given up by Mishkin.