'Who cares what the past was?': Canada's women look for redemption against U.S. in women's hockey final

Chris Jones reports from Milan.

There are two kinds of inevitabilities: The ones that give you comfort, and the ones that give you dread.

For Canada’s women’s hockey team, the fact that they were going to face the U.S. in the gold-medal game was the right kind of foregone conclusion.

For all the progress that’s been made in the women’s game, there remain levels to it. When Canada beat Switzerland 2-1 in Monday’s semifinal, it felt more like a formality than a victory, as close as the score was. The Canadians, winners of five gold medals and two silvers in seven previous Olympics, did what they had to do.

That was even truer for the fearsome, heavily favoured Americans, who easily dispatched the Swedes 5-0 earlier in the afternoon on the same ice.

Now comes the sort of inevitability that requires conquering.

Canada, which was worse than the U.S. in every possible way in a 5-0 loss in the preliminary round, has 72 hours to find the belief that Thursday’s final will have a different result — that they can somehow beat an American team that’s younger, faster, meaner, stronger.

“It’s a 60-minute game,” captain Marie-Philip Poulin said, imagining what she will tell her teammates before they take the ice. “For us, as a group, it’s going to be all about us, all about our heart.”

Poulin missed the ugly preliminary loss with a knee injury. She will play in the final, and her presence will no doubt change the balance at least a little: She scored both goals against the Swiss, breaking Hayley Wickenheiser’s record for the most at the Olympics with her first.

“So clutch,” Renata Fast said. “She shines in moments like this, but it’s the work she puts in every single day that allows her to do it.”

She won’t be able to do it alone against the Americans.

They are a scarifying team, the monster under this tournament’s bed. They have scored at least five goals in every game in Milan and allowed exactly one, in their opening game against Czechia. They’ve since gone more than 331 minutes without giving up a goal while scoring whenever they’ve decided they probably should.

U.S. forward Taylor Heise was asked, before she knew that the Americans would in fact meet the Canadians once again, whether beating a team in the preliminary round gave her even more confidence than she might have otherwise.

“Nothing matters,” Heise said. “It’s the gold-medal game. Everyone’s going to show up, and if they don’t, they’re not meant to be there.”