My favorite sports memory as a kid will always be the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. I was seven years old, just old enough to understand that something enormous was happening but still young enough to feel it more than analyze it. I didn’t know anything about geopolitics, the Cold War, or why beating the Soviets was supposed to be impossible. All I knew was that a bunch of college kids in red, white, and blue were skating with a kind of belief I had never seen before, and the whole country seemed to be holding its breath with them.
In our house the television felt like a campfire. My parents weren’t huge hockey people, but even they couldn’t look away. When Al Michaels asked, “Do you believe in miracles?” I didn’t understand how perfect the line was—I just knew that my heart was pounding the way it did when you’re seven and you realize sports can feel bigger than anything. Those players looked like grown-ups to me, but they also looked like the older brothers every kid wishes he had.
Decades later, in 2018, I had the pleasure of meeting most of the team. Standing in front of Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, and the others, I felt like that same kid again. By then I knew the backstories—how many of them, including Eruzione and Craig, were Boston University graduates, how Herb Brooks molded them, how improbable the run truly was. But knowing the details didn’t shrink the magic; it made it deeper.
Watching the new Netflix documentary brought all of it rushing back. The interviews, the footage, the reminder that they were ordinary young men doing something extraordinary—it hit differently as an adult who understands how rare true team chemistry is. The 1980 team wasn’t just about a game. It was about hope, timing, and the idea that sometimes a group of people can be better than history says they should be. For a seven-year-old kid, that lesson never left me.
