Mounsey Makes Most of Moment

Sprained knee or not, Tara Mounsey wasn’t going to miss the U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team’s debut Sunday. And although it had been barely two weeks since she fell hard against the boards in an exhibition game and merely three days since she was permitted to resume skating--and then only with a brace--this wasn’t the time to wait.

After a successful test early Sunday, she knew she couldn’t sit. Not after the thousands of hours she had spent practicing and shooting pucks in her basement with her father to develop a slap shot that is among the most dangerous in women’s hockey.

“What would it have taken to keep me out?” said Mounsey, the U.S. hockey team’s top-scoring defenseman in pre-Olympic play. “Maybe a broken leg. As long as I was feeling OK, I was going to play.”

Despite her injury, Mounsey launched a game-high 12 shots on goal--five in the first period, one more than the Chinese team. She played only the first two periods to protect her knee, but that was ample time for her to score one goal and set up a power-play goal by Karyn Bye, propelling the second-seeded U.S. team to a 5-0 victory over China before 3,255 at Aqua Wing.

Cammi Granato, one of three women who have been with the U.S. national team since its inception in 1990, showed her usual persistence around the net in scoring the game’s first and last goals, and Katie King added two assists to support goaltender Sarah Tueting’s 10-save effort.

“Before the game, Cammi and I always give each other a good-luck tap,” Bye said, “and this time we locked eyes like we were saying, ‘This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for. Let’s do it.’ ”

They did it well, if not perfectly, scoring twice on power plays in the first period to work off their early jitters and wear down fourth-seeded China with their superior playmaking and finishing skills. Mounsey acknowledged being nervous when she thought of the historical implications of playing in the first women’s Olympic hockey tournament, but she couldn’t allow herself to become distracted.

“We kind of reflected on all the hard times,” said Mounsey, who played on boys’ teams while growing up in Concord, N.H., and was named the state’s high school player of the year for 1995-96. “It was a long road to get here, but we really had to focus on the task at hand. Once we got out there, we had to think of it as just another hockey tournament.”

Having Mounsey in the lineup made it almost just another routine victory for the U.S., which was 24-7-1 in its pre-Olympic tour.

“She just controls the ice,” Tueting said of Mounsey, who set up Bye’s 20-foot wrist shot with 43 seconds left in the first period and gave the U.S. a 3-0 lead with a hard, low shot past the right leg of goalie Hong Guo at 14:53 of the second period. “She can go end to end and she can go into a scrum of four or five players and come up with the puck. Her confidence really helps everyone.”

Mounsey’s offensive abilities could be especially helpful because goal differential [goals scored minus goals against] is one of the tiebreaking factors when teams finish with identical records. Top-seeded Canada and third-seeded Finland also won their openers in routs, leaving the U.S. playing not only to win but to win big Monday against Sweden.

“I said at the opening faceoff, ‘This is it. Don’t hold anything back,’ ” Granato said. “And that’s how we have to approach it. We’ve been in that situation [of resorting to goal differential] before at the world championships. Every goal counts, and we’re very aware of that.”

’