Every USA Olympic hockey team, ranked by miracles on ice

1. Lake Placid Olympics, 1980

As if there was ever any doubt.

I don’t have a great story to tell you about the 1980 team that you haven’t already heard. You’ve read everything in history about them. You’ve seen Miracle. If you’re younger, you got caught up thanks to that movie and the 2002 team, which tried to re-create the movie.

I wasn’t alive when the Miracle on Ice happened. I wasn’t even a thought in my parents head in 1980. However, I was in high school when Miracle came out and I had friends who liked hockey. A rare thing in America, I know.

We scored advanced tickets to the movie. I wore my Team USA jersey because I’m a real American hockey fan with a Team USA jersey. Being a Disney film, there were a lot kids in the audience who maybe didn’t care about hockey. We were there for the hockey.

When the game against the Soviet Union takes place, my friends and I decided to be, what could be considered, obnoxious. We didn’t talk loudly during the game. We cheered loudly when William Schneider scored. We boo’d when the Soviet Union responded.

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We leapt out of our seats when Michael Eruzione potted the game-winner and counted down in the third period.

And everyone in the audience joined in. We turned a movie theater into a Olympic Fieldhouse.

That’s the kind of emotion a movie based on the 1980 team brought out of myself and hundreds of others in that theater. I can’t imagine the kind of emotion the actual game brought out of the country.