USA-Canada hockey 1998 Olympic final helped lift women’s sports to new heights today

Women’s sports continues to grow in popularity, not just with the record television ratings during the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, but with the Professional Women’s Hockey League. The six-team league began play in January, with a stop at Little Caesars Arena last month. With that in mind, we look at one of the seminal moments in women’s hockey history, chronicled in the book, “A Miracle of Their Own,” written by former Free Press sports writer Keith Gave. The book looks at the 1998 win by USA Hockey’s women’s team in the Nagano Olympics over Canada, the impetus of one of the top rivalries in all of sports.

For many years after Team USA’s upset of Canada at the inaugural women’s Olympic ice hockey tournament in Nagano, some members on the wrong side of that outcome tended to downplay their silver medals. Rather, they were prone to say, “We lost the gold.” Because their mindset going into the Games was that winning anything by gold was unimaginable.

Then it happened, and the repercussions on the other side of their border were stunning.

Suddenly, young American girls in record numbers were trading in their figure skates for hockey skates. The numbers of girls competing in youth leagues skyrocketed. In 1990, when some of members of that 1998 team were young girls beginning their hockey careers playing with and against boys because that was their only opportunity to play, there were fewer than 7,000 registered female ice hockey players in the United States, according to USA Hockey. By the time the American women won their second Olympic gold in 2018, there were nearly 80,000 females registered to play hockey in the United States — included the 23 women who struck gold in Pyeonchang.

Until she was seven years old, Kendall Coyne didn’t know another girl who played hockey. But in the summer of 1998, when she attended Cammi Granato’s hockey camp in suburban Chicago, she met 100 other girls who shared her passion for the sport. Coyne, now Kendall Coyne-Schofield, recalled for an interviewer how excited she was to go back to school that fall and tell all her doubting friends that “girls really do play hockey. That moment at camp fueled me to do something that would changed my life…