Megan Keller was a 21-year-old next-big-thing-on-defense when she won her first Olympic gold medal, in Pyeongchang, the winter before her senior year of college. She was also very nearly the reason her team lost it. The refs whistled her for an illegal hit on Canadian captain Marie-Philip Poulin late in overtime, and her teammates spent 95 chilling seconds on the penalty kill atoning for her sins. With the hindsight of a gold medal, Keller’s veteran teammates could be gracious about this. “She didn’t make a mistake,” Hilary Knight said afterward. “I didn’t agree with the call. She made some big plays, some big plays to keep the puck in. … She has this medal in her pocket and I hope she goes and gets four more.”
That game foreshadowed the minutes-eating defender Keller would become for the national team and eventually in the PWHL. (She played just shy of 30 minutes in the Boston Fleet’s last regulation game before the Olympic break.) But even as she led her team in ice time in Pyeongchang, she had to enjoy the gold medal win at a distance. The 25 unserved seconds of her minor penalty meant Keller was ineligible for the shootout and would need to stay in the box for the rest of the game. Incredibly, the same sequence transpired at the women’s world championships the following year, in a nervy (and scandalous) gold-medal game between the U.S. and Finland. Keller took a slashing penalty with a little under two minutes left in overtime. When Alex Cavallini made the “golden save” in the Finland shootout, Keller skated into the celebration from the other side of the rink. You could say she was due. This time, the celebration skated into her.
To the extent that anyone can ever feel any comfort at any moment in any U.S.-Canada game, the Americans could find a little hope in the meta for three-on-three hockey, which rewards fresh legs, strong puck possession teams, and offensive blueliners. The story of this rivalry before the gold-medal game, written here and everywhere else, was that Team USA had shed its veteran dead weight since Beijing, made its roster younger and faster, and could overwhelm a Canadian team still riding its veterans. I stuck to this story even late in regulation during the gold-medal game in Milan: Keller’s pairing with Laila Edwards looked so precarious at times that I wondered whether it might be best to lighten up on Keller’s minutes and let the younger Caroline Harvey take on more, a kind of torch-passing reversal of the team’s blue-line deployment in Beijing, when Keller played half the gold-medal game and Harvey played a little over a minute. The future is now, old woman.
The future is now: The next Olympic cycle should be similarly kind to the Americans as their NCAA superstars are sharpened by pro competition in the new PWHL. But on Thursday, the future needed something solid to lean on, and the old guard delivered. Taylor Heise, playing in her first Olympics, set up the golden chance with an outlet pass and Keller finished it. For overtime to happen at all, Team USA needed a similar collaboration. The 22-year-old Edwards got a little help from her 36-year-old captain, Knight, who deflected in a one-timer to tie the game in the final minutes of the third period. To their credit, a Canadian team whose gold-medal chances were written off early in this tournament played a pretty much perfect defensive game on account of its veterans. The 31-year-old Laura Stacey outworked and outshone everyone on the ice; she set up Canada’s only score of the game, a shorthanded goal on the rush. Goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens is a weary enough veteran that she’s already retired from hockey once, discouraged by the lack of opportunities in her sport after Pyeongchang. “You get on the big stage, the Olympics, and then people just forget that you exist the other four years,” she said in 2021. While Canada’s offense struggled to create chances, her performance in net kept buying them time to figure it out.
Sheer youth is one means to fresh legs; so is hard-earned stamina. The veterans on both teams built their careers in the least convenient circumstances possible. Wage disputes and folding leagues and a pandemic ate away at their primes. The sport’s future looks much simpler and rosier for the up-and-coming players; it belongs to the Harveys and Heises and Sarah Filliers. Games like this one, though—nauseating, ugly, and tense—they belong to the Knights and Kellers and Staceys and Desbienses, those who can find something left to give at the end.
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