VANCOUVER — They kept coming after Ryan Miller as those final minutes peeled off the clock, real-time feeling like slow motion, wave after wave of red-sweatered Canadians rushing at him two and three at a time. This was Sunday night, inside a star chamber of desperation known as Canada Hockey Place, and Miller kept turning them away.
“I swear,” he would say, “it looked like there were 10 of them out there sometimes.”
Of the 18,000 witnesses in the house, only one set of eyes could understand what was really going on behind Miller’s busy, colorful goalie’s mask, because once upon a time in a city called Lake Placid, he had seen something that looked an awful lot like what Miller was seeing.
“I’ll tell you what I was really thinking watching Ryan play at the end,” Jim Craig said yesterday, smiling, drinking in a memory he has gratefully recalled every day of the last 30 years.
“I was thinking, ‘I have no idea how my father was able to watch me play. I was that nervous.’ ”
Yesterday was a day when Craig’s recollections would have been especially vivid, anyway, because it was exactly 30 years to the day from when he and the other Miracle Boys turned in what is, and will likely always be, the greatest upset in the history of sports, a 4-3 win over the unbeatable Soviet Red Army Olympic team.
“What’s the second-biggest upset ever?” Craig was asked, and he smiled, and then smiled wider, and tried to come up with something, and failed.
“I have no idea,” he said. “I really don’t.”
It wasn’t Sunday, even if the U.S.’ 5-3 win was as feel-good a win as any Olympic hockey victory going all the way back to 30 years ago tomorrow, the day Craig and his teammates finished off the Finns and secured themselves the gold medal.
There is a wonderful little story that Craig’s teammate, Mike Eruzione, always tells from that long-overlooked game against Finland. As much pressure as the Canadians feel now, at these hometown Games, it honestly pales to the pressure the United States felt that day after knocking off the Russians.
Except if they lost to the Finns, the U.S. might still have gotten shut out of a medal entirely. Knowing this kept coach Herb Brooks from giving his pregame speech until the absolute last possible moment. And when he did, it was brief:
“Lose this game,” he told them, “you’ll take it to your bleepin’ grave.”
Brooks turned, stopped, turned around again.
“Your bleepin’ grave,” he added.
In many ways, Brian Burke, the U.S. general manager, has inherited Brooks’ tough-guy mantle all these years later, and he spoke openly yesterday about how disappointed he’s been in his team’s play, despite its 3-0 record and No. 1 seed in the medal round.
“Canada outplayed us the whole game,” he said. “Our goalie just stole one for us.”
Jim Craig knows the feeling. Thirty years ago, he was an All-American at Boston University who was given a fierce comeuppance a few days before the Olympics when the Soviets ransacked him for 10 goals. Two weeks later, he faced 39 shots and turned away 36, and across those final 10 minutes withstood a fusillade of Soviet pressure.
On his mask, Craig had painted a shamrock for luck, and as he joked yesterday: “It worked.” It was only on Sunday that Craig learned that Miller, too, has a shamrock painted on his mask — and it was Miller’s parents who told Craig that it was meant as a tribute to his ancestor in the U.S. goal.
“I was touched,” Craig said. “Really, really moved.”
Then he watched Miller, as the rest of us did, and he marveled at what he saw.
“I know what he was feeling,” Jim Craig said, and he was the only man on earth who honestly could have said that, and meant it.