It’s One of the Greatest Rivalries in Sports. Now, the Americans Own It.

This is part of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage. Read more  here .  About two minutes into the shambolic three-on-three overtime format that decides Olympic hockey games, the Americans saw their lives flash before their eyes. The player who has tormented the U.S.

women’s hockey program for years had the puck streaking down the right wing, and she fired an off-angle shot that had no real business going into the net. But because it was Marie-Philip Poulin , of course it was going in. Only this time it didn’t, and a few minutes later, Team USA finally slayed the Canadian beast.

The Americans had outscored their opponents 31-1 in their first five games of the Olympic women’s hockey tournament. One of those games was a 5-0 destruction of the same Canadian team that was now threatening them. The Americans had been the best team in the world for a while but were lugging around infinite mental baggage from past Olympics losses to the country that invented hockey.

In this Olympic final, they went down 1-0, then pressed for nearly 40 minutes to find a tying goal. Team captain Hillary Knight, likely playing in the final game of the most decorated American Olympic hockey career ever, at last delivered it on a poetic tip-in with 124 seconds left,.

Then, with Poulin on the ice for Canada, Megan Keller scored an iconic, dangling, sudden-death goal to win the tournament for the United States. Three-on-three is a silly way to decide a game of this magnitude. Keller is a defenseman who, in a normal game of hockey, would never catch a pass in the offensive zone, let alone weave in on goal and score.

But it wound up feeling right that it took something so deeply bizarre for the U.S. team to triumph. Gold-medal games don’t need additional stakes. This one had them, though. The Americans were either going to cap off a run of domination unlike any in their history, or they were going to take what would’ve been the most psychologically devastating defeat they’d ever endured.

(And there have been a lot of them.) Instead of that disappointment, the U.S. women have solidified themselves as the undisputed best team in the world. There’s never been real shame in losing to Canada. Women’s hockey only joined the Olympic program in 1998. Our northern pals won five of the first seven golds, all but one coming against the United States, which had won the other two.

But the way things had developed recently, there would have been shame, fair or not, in the Stars and Stripes not getting over the hump on Thursday. It would be an understatement to say that the Americans have had Canada’s number lately. That romp in the group stage was Team USA’s seventh win in a row against the country that has traditionally dominated women’s hockey, with all of those wins coming in the last year.

Team USA won two close games against Canada at last April’s IIHF World Championship, including an overtime clincher in the gold-medal game. When they faced off four times in November and December in the Rivalry Series, an annual event that this year also had the flavor of an Olympic tuneup, the Americans won all four. None of them were close.

The Americans’ win in the Olympic group stage wasn’t just seven in a row, but a fifth consecutive rout. By the time they dropped the puck on Thursday, there wasn’t a math-y reason to think Canada had a chance, and most people did not give them much of one. Betting markets gave the United States about an 80 percent chance of winning.