Life long hockey fans, we grew up in MN, had season tickets to Gopher Hockey. Minnesota had a number of kids on that team. H was a youth baseball coach for one of the US players…so yes, it was a big deal to us.
@Gmtplus7, that game was taped and delayed until prime time. Are you saying you were at the game?!
I remember it very clearly. My late husband and I were listening to it on the car radio while we drove to a sporting event he was participating in. When we got there the game wasn’t over yet and we sat in the parking lot listening to the end, then screamed with joy when we won, quite surprising others in the lot who weren’t aware what was going on. I recently ended up in that same lot, about 30 miles from our home, for the first time since that day. Memories of our joy at the USA win came flooding back. I just wish he was there with me to relive that moment too.
Awesome memories! I was with my husband (then boyfriend) and we were watching with a large group and screaming with joy. We ‘knew’ a few of the players during our college days. I played hockey as a kid, with the boys. I made it through PeeWees, but that’s where my career ended. 
My kids also played hockey and we have enjoyed the movie several times. Herb Brooks, the legendary coach of the team, has several ‘Brooksisms’ that my kids have used over the years.
“You’re playing worse and worse every day and right now you’re playing like it’s next month.”
“You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours.”
Some of them can’t be printed…
Anxiousmom1 - I am sorry for your loss.
I’ve watched the movie dozens of times. I’m still surprised every single time that the US wins.
I do remember where I was when I first learned they won. I was driving home from work and heard it on the radio. Most people don’t remember that it was a pretty early game (5 pm?) and most who watched it didn’t watch it live.
I remember watching it in our sorority house at the University of North Dakota, another big hockey school. Dave Christian was the only player from our school on the team.
What’s actually more surprising about my remembering the game is that I’d just had two wisdom teeth out that afternoon, and was staying at a friend’s apartment (was in my college town), and was rather doped up with narcotics. But I remember watching (and eating scrambled eggs). There might have been a cat nap or two in there, despite the excitement and yelling going on around me.
And after that game, they still had to beat Finland to win the gold medal. My father, who was of Finnish ancestry, was rather torn. 
Remember Walter Mondale, jumping up and shouting in the stands? As a man of Scandinavian mien, he was never seen displaying that lack of restraint before or after, I think!
That reminds me of another gem from the same Olympics. A Finnish cross-country skiing star won some distance race in, IIRC, a fairly thrilling manner. The BBC announcer says, “And the Finns have lost all restraint!” The camera pans over to a group of people politely waving. :-h Then the press tries to approach the winner, and she jumps over a barrier and skis away: too shy. But not too tired to run away after skiing 30 kilometers or so.
I was a kid when I watched it from the US. I just assumed it was live.
I grew up in Mass and it as a big deal for us, since we had some team members, and of course Mike Eruzione ,the team captain.
I was in high school and our hockey team was in the state finals during that time ( or at least very close to it ) It was a source of pride that our team played the school that Jim Craig’s brother played for , and we beat them.
Our team went on to win the state championship , played at the Boston Garden . Back then, the entire school got to go see the finals and tae the day off from school , so it was hard not to get into it 
Also, my friends and I saw Mike Eruzione driving his brand new Mazda RX7 post olympics .
I remember watching it, I was a junior in High School and it was a big deal. Neither myself nor none of my friends were hockey players or fans, but I think we all got caught up in a bunch of college kids playing and winning against the best in the world, and the Red Army team was about as much amateur as the NY Yankees (keep in mind that the Red Army team beat a lot of NHL and other pro teams over the years, including several Stanley Cup winning teams), and it was huge to see a bunch of kids not much older than us do that…and we all marvelled at Herb Brooks, how intense he was (while quietly thanking our lucky stars not to be playing for him…from non athletic kids perspective, he was scary smile). It was a classic underdog story. I recall that some of the Russian players during the intermission of the US-Finland game, went into the locker room and told the US team to take oxygen to be able to revive themselves…It also was a time when few things seemed to be going right in the world, and it meant something to see a bunch of kids pull off a victory against a juggernaut.
@youdon’tsay, I watched that documentary instead of the basketball game last night. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for the tip.
Background: We are a sports family…Mr. Ellebud is part French Canadian,and he LOVES hockey. One of the Ellebud kings works for a professional team here. I enjoy sports…but hockey, not so much.
We were in an airplane headed for a business meeting. The pilot broke in and said that he was going to keep us informed…and he took us to the beginning of the third period. We landed and ran to a bar in the airport. We followed the game to the end. And then the screaming started…fantastic!
It’s interesting. I think it was it was Wikipedia that said, "even though the game wasn’t shown live (it was taped at 5pm, when it began, and wasn’t shown until later that night, during prime time), many people who watched it that night thought they were seeing it live.
I think I may well have actually seen it live, since it wasn’t American and there was a 5 or 6 hour time difference.
I was an exchange student in France and I was on the plane - not sure if coming or going. I remember the pilot breaking in when we were sleeping to announce the news and people cheered. I had had no idea we were playing Russia in hockey in the first place; I never much cared for sports, so I didn’t really care one way or the other. (And still kind of don’t, lol) I don’t really get what the big deal was over this win, but I don’t really get excited over Anericans winning medals at Olympics - it’s not MY accomplishment!
The Soviet team had dominated hockey for years and years and years. The Soviet players to a man felt that no team at that Olympics would provide them with any competition whatsoever. Funded by the State, they were essentially pro players, but the US players were truly amateurs; most were college kids. They were the youngest team at the games, the average age being 21 I believe. The veteran Soviet players would have easily been some of the best pros in the NHL if they had been allowed to play professionally. Someone compared the win to a bunch of Canadian college kids playing the New England Patriots in football and beating them. No one saw it coming.
The Soviet players themselves stated that they didn’t even consider the Americans as being opponents in any real sense of the word. When they began playing, one of the Soviet players noted that the same kids they had trounced just 10 days before seemed like a different team, playing with amazing speed and emotion. Yet they still didn’t even consider the possibility of losing to them until the very last minute.
When they arrived home, their countrymen would pin them down, saying “How could you lose?! And to whom? STUDENTS?! Were you drunk?”
It was truly a David and Goliath situation, and if you add in the cold war, the situation in Afghanistan, etc., it really was a big deal here for the kids to humiliate the veterans, on American soil, no less.
The Boston newspapers splashed stories about the local college players on the US team leading up to the victory. The game with Finland began at 11 AM Sunday morning. I was torn about which team to root for as I had been a summer exchange student in Finland during the previous Summer Olympics.
I still remember my host family celebrating when Lasse Viren won a gold medal in a distance race. I saw a few Finnish athletes training on roller skis in their off season, and toured the sites of the Helsinki Olympic Games.
Although I remember the game, I do not remember where I was or with whom. H and I decided to go to Lake Placid for an extended weekend one autumn about two years ago. They have a very small Olympics museum that I was not particularity excited to visit. But it was actually very interesting. They had a good sized display and video about this event. Plus the museum is housed in the arena where the game took place. You could feel a sense of the excitement just visiting the place.
It is hard to believe such a major event, sports wise, took place in this small town in the middle of the Adirondack mountains in upstate NY. This is literally in the middle of nowhere. You have to drive on narrow roads off of a highway that is hours from any populous area. The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful. Over 6 million acres of the Adirondacks were made a preserve by the state of NY in the late 1800’s, far outdistancing the Wilderness Preserve Act of 1964. It’s worth a visit.
Not only were they college students, but they weren’t even the top college or youth players. They were more or less second string.