Sports Redux: Blame Canada Bostonist

We're up front and honest here at Bostonist. We'll fess up when we screw up. So in the interest of further disclosure, we'll freely admit that the words "Just as long as Sidney Crosby doesn't score the game-winner" were uttered by this Bostonist exactly 0.00045 seconds before Sidney Crosby scored the game-winner. Sorry about that.

We don't even have any particularly strong beef against the hockey wunderkind. We were rooting for the US, of course, but it wouldn't have broken and didn't break our hearts to see Canada, a perfectly nice and friendly neighbour, win the gold in the sport in which we keep stealing their NHL teams and bringing them to ridiculous places like Phoenix. No, it was like the cosmos opened up and said, "Let's make someone say something really stupid right now."

Our faux pas put a sad ending on a few hours of utter excitement and sheer joy as the US and Canada battled into overtime in what was probably the best hockey game we ever watched. Canada grabbed a 2-0 lead, even as our goalie Ryan Miller and their goalie Roberto Luongo traded some dazzling saves. The US closed the gap, fought and fought and fought, and silenced the entire country of Canada (which admittedly is always pretty quiet) when Zach Parise beat Luongo with 24 seconds to go. But Canada got loud again in overtime, after Crosby shoved our ill-advised comment down our throat, winning the gold and causing many a Molson to be spilled across the North.

The American boys were down, but not out. Said Miller on the game-winner: "I wasn’t going to change my game just because it was overtime." Jack Johnson added, "Unfortunately, this is winner-take-all. Hey, we split two games with them and they won the only one that really matters." On the other side of the ice, Chris Pronger said, "you’re going to see a lot of kids grow up now, wishing they were Crosby winning the gold medal."

Now the hockey Olympians return to the NHL regular schedule, and the other Olympians return to whatever it is they do to keep themselves busy between Olympics. We enjoyed these two weeks a lot more than we thought we would, and learned a valuable lesson about keeping our mouths shut.