Well, Miracle opens up tomorrow, and I'll probably go see it just because I enjoy sports movies. There are two big hypotheticals that are fun to discuss. 1) What if the United States had lost to the USSR? For one, this movie certainly wouldn't have been made, so that is millions of dollars of impact right there, over 20 years later. That victory was as much of a political event as it was a sporting event. That hockey match brought a lot of attention to the Cold War during a time when Vietnam was still relatively fresh in everybody's mind. Perhaps communism doesn't fall less than a decade later and we're still looking at one huge pink blob on our globes instead of a multi-colored hue (apologies in advance for the Wayne's World reset). It's a BIG stretch to think that the collapse of an entire political system hinged on the outcome of one hockey game, but it's not completely out of the question. 2) What if the United States had not beaten Finland in the gold medal game? We've seen it happen many times before, in all sports. A team gets a huge, hard fought win against a heated rival, then is emotionally exhausted and gets beaten in the next game. An interesting aspect of the miracle on ice is that you NEVER hear about the gold medal game against Finland. I can replay that clip of the final 10 seconds of the USSR game in my head perfectly, complete with Al Michaels's commentary, but I have never seen one second of footage from the gold medal game. That leads me to believe that the outcome of the gold medal game is completely irrelevant, which only maginifies the importance of the miracle game. I don't know of any big sporting event in which the championship was overshadowed by the semi-finals so significantly.
The movie leaves out the best Herb Brooks quote of the tournament. At the 2nd intermission with the U.S. losing to Finland, Brooks said something like: “You have twenty minutes left. Give it twenty minutes or you'll take it to your F#&%*g graves." Much better than "win one for the gipper".
1) What if the United States had lost to the USSR? 2) What if the United States had not beaten Finland in the gold medal game? Well first of all, it would have still been a huge accomplishment to even make the medal round. They were lucky to qualify for the Olympics if memory servers. While no one would have remembered them if they didn't win, it still would have been very cool. Second, the economics of communisim is what made the Soviet Union fail. Popular opinion of their government really had nothing to do with it.
