SOCHI 2014: Team Canada defeat USA 1-0 in hockey semifinal

The ice in front of their goals was filled with the zooming bodies of a few dozen of the fastest skaters and hardest shots in all of hockey, and their immediate air space was peppered with flying pucks. For 60 frantic minutes of play, this went on, the United States and Canada men’s hockey teams trying like mad to score past them, and Jonathan Quick and Carey Price, the respective goalies, almost uniformly shutting them down.

But a lone puck, out of the 68 fired, found its way past the pads and sticks of these two world-class goalies, and it was into Quick’s net, through no real fault of his. And so, the Canadians won another entertaining, Olympian battle between these North American rivals, 1-0, and it is Canada who will move on to play Sweden in Sunday’s gold-medal game.

The U.S. will play Finland on Saturday in the bronze-medal game.

Canada took a 1-0 lead less than two minutes into the second period on a beautiful give-and-go goal by Jamie Benn, who fed Jay Bouwmeester above the left face-off circle, then went towards the net, where Bouwmeester put a perfect pass on his stick. Benn deflected it past U.S. goalie Jonathan Quick, who stood no chance. Benn’s goal was only the eighth in this tournament for Canada’s forwards.

Neither Benn nor Bouwmeester (nor Price, for that matter) were on the 2010 Canadian team that beat the U.S. in the gold medal game of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

On a rink full of talented offensive forces, Price, a three-time all-star for the Montreal Canadiens, and Quick, of the Los Angeles Kings, were the best players on the ice. Price turned away numerous point-blank shots by the U.S. forwards, and there were no particularly close calls. At the other end, Quick, too, was stellar. With just under six minutes left in the game, and the Canadians continuing to attack, he stopped Chris Kunitz on a pair of point-blank tries.

Having allowed just three goals so far in this tournament, Price has compensated for the curious scoring drought of Canada’s collection of forwards, who have combined to score just eight goals of the tournament. Sidney Crosby, the great Pittsburgh Penguins center and overtime hero of the 2010 Vancouver gold-medal game, is still looking for his first goal of these Olympics.

With the Russian team out of the tournament after a quarterfinals loss to Finland, the Bolshoy Dome was strangely quiet for much of the game, with occasional chants of “U-S-A!” and “Ca-na-da!” lobbed from one corner of the building to the other, and an even more occasional chant of “Shaybu!” (“Score!”) from the apparently neutral Russian contingent.

The U.S. has never won Olympic gold outside its own borders, its two titles coming in the Squaw Valley 1960 Games and the Lake Placid 1980 Games