Team Canada’s Revenge, Served Ice-Cold

In mid-February, before the first meeting between Team Canada and Team U.S.A. in the 4 Nations Face-Off, an N.H.L. midseason exhibition tournament featuring the best players from the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Finland, in Montreal, Matthew and Brady Tkachuk, a pair of brothers on the U.S. team, and their teammate J. T. Miller texted about instigating a few brawls at the start of the game. Fighting is not allowed in hockey, strictly speaking, but it has a long and glorified tradition. The Americans wanted to send “a message,” Matthew said afterward—while giving the people what they want. There were three fights in the first nine seconds, tidy one-on-one bouts. It worked: word spread of the fights on social media, and, as the game progressed, television audiences soared. The hockey itself was riveting—fast, crisp, and clean—and the U.S. won, 3–1.

Afterward, everyone seemed happy—the coaches and players on both sides, fans, arrivistes, even the referees. “That was pretty cool, eh?” Brady Tkachuk said to the lead official on the ice, after serving his time in the penalty box. “Holy shit, what a start, man,” the ref replied. “That was fucking unreal.” The next day, Team Canada’s coach, Jon Cooper, said that the “game is in a better place because last night’s game existed”—and his team lost. Only Brandon Hagel, a Canadian forward who was Matthew Tkachuk’s target when the puck dropped, seemed aggrieved, when he heard that the Americans had planned the fights by text, instead of dropping their gloves in crimes of passion. “We’re out there playing for a flag, not the cameras,” Hagel said. “That’s the part of Canada that we have in there. We don’t need to initiate anything. We don’t need any group chats going on.” When Matthew Tkachuck was told about Hagel’s dig, he laughed. No group chats? “Maybe their team doesn’t like each other,” he shot back.

This, apparently, is what passes for trash talk in hockey, a sport where everyone seems to like each other. Then again, the punches were real enough. (The same week that Hagel and Tkachuk were trading barbs, the legend Bobby Hull’s widow announced that a posthumous study of his brain had found the telltale markers of C.T.E.) The tension between Canada and the United States seemed real, too. Donald Trump has been blowing his foghorn of threats against Canada, and before that game in Montreal, the Canadian crowd had booed during the United States’ national anthem. Inflaming the situation, Team U.S.A.’s general manager, Bill Guerin, invited Trump to the tournament’s final, on Thursday, in Boston—a rematch against Canada. Trump hardly needed an excuse to make it about himself. He called the U.S.A. team that morning to rally the boys, and, in a post on Truth Social, reiterated his desire to make Canada the fifty-first state and referred to the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as “Governor.”

Was Trump serious? Had the rivalry between the two teams turned into a proxy battle in a new Cold War? Or was it one big joke? “This is not a political forum,” Guerin said when asked about Trump’s comments, as if he hadn’t invited them. “This is a hockey tournament.” To the Americans, at least, the bluster might have seemed a kind of burlesque, not much different from the fighting. To Canadians, the comments were more than a little degrading, even setting aside the actual threats. Hockey is at the heart of Canada’s culture, its identity. The sense of the stakes rose immeasurably. Only weeks earlier, many serious hockey fans had criticized the tournament as a meaningless contrivance, a way for the N.H.L. to squeeze more money out of the season. Most casual fans hadn’t known it existed. Now some players were calling it the most important game of their lives.

A couple of hours before the championship, chants of “U.S.A.” echoed inside the cold, cavernous entrance from the Causeway to TD Garden, in Boston. There were fans dressed in Team U.S.A. jerseys and in clothing featuring the Stars and Stripes, and at least one wore a bald-eagle costume. There were also a surprising number of red Canadian sweaters, and a man holding up a large sign that read “Welcome to the U.S.A., Canada’s 11th province.” The atmosphere was loud but not quite unruly, barring some jeers at the start of the Canadian national anthem. Then the game began.

You could call what was going on sportswashing: Trump was laundering the destruction of various aspects of American society by connecting himself to the positive image and fair play of sport. It was never quite clear whether the chants of “U.S.A.” or the full-throated singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” were stirring displays of healthy patriotism or trolling calls to annex the opponents. But it was also a hockey game, and it was as fantastic as you could hope for. There was one measly penalty, for tripping, and, besides a little sweater-holding, tempers stayed in check. Hockey, with its high-speed collisions and the swinging sticks, is always controlled violence. Nonetheless, on Thursday night, what came through most clearly besides the speed was a sense of order.

Skaters turned and arced, arced and turned, their jerseys, bright against the white ice, reorganizing like a kaleidoscope. The game rarely stopped or even slowed, but was constantly refreshed as the lines turned over and the dynamics of the players changed. Every once in a while, a quick step would find a sliver and space, and the scene would shift direction, bringing a new possibility that something big might happen. And, in overtime, the biggest thing that could’ve happened happened: Connor McDavid, the world’s best player, was left wide open in the slot, received a pass from the corner, and shot. They call him McJesus up north.

A lot was said in the stretch leading up to the final about the contrast between the obvious intensity of the 4 Nations tournament and last Sunday’s N.B.A. All-Star Game, which was a bloated parade of celebrity and, for the players, a pantomime of effort. It was never a fair comparison. The N.H.L. has kept its best players out of major international competitions for almost a decade, whereas the N.B.A.’s stars compete, with pride and commitment, every four years at the Olympics. Still, it was something to see the euphoria of Canada’s players as they flung their helmets and gloves in the air, and the ashen faces of the U.S. players as they sat in stunned silence.

N.H.L. players will finally return to the Olympics next year, for the first time since 2014, and there will also be the World Cup of Hockey two years after that. It’s possible that there won’t be an appetite among N.H.L. owners for another 4 Nations Face-Off; owners might balk at it, after a handful of star players suffered serious injuries. It was a meaningless game, which is what made it easy to freight with so much meaning. The players skated and passed and forechecked with such fervor because they were some of the best players in the world playing against some of the other best players in the world, and the game demanded it. They had pride, something to prove. Sports are vulnerable to politics precisely because they make people care.

Nearly ten million people watched Thursday night’s final on ESPN—the largest audience for a hockey game on the network, and the most-watched N.H.L. game ever in the U.S. More than a quarter of Canada’s population was watching on Sportsnet. When the championship ended, Trudeau posted on X, “You can’t take our country—and you can’t take our game.” It was at once justified and pointless. The game was enough. Then came the handshake line, the greatest ritual of reconciliation in all of sport. By then, the U.S. fans were filing out. But the players, at least, understood the importance of that moment, and not just everything that had come before. ♦