Big Hat + Big Ice = Big Loss

At Big Hat, the hockey arena here that looks like one, two ugly Americans stood in the mezzanine, shooting off their big mouths.

“Hey! Hey, Salo!” one kept heckling Sweden’s goalie, Tommy Salo, after two U.S. pucks got past him, a minute 40 seconds apart. “Does your husband play hockey too?”

I wondered where they were from.

“Let’s go, Rangers! Let’s go, Rangers!” they began to chant.

Oh. Howard Stern fans.

I should have known these guys were New Yorkers, not because they were loud or rude, but because when Salo isn’t playing for Sweden, he belongs to the New York Islanders. An enemy is an enemy. It makes no difference whether you’re in Asia or on Long Island.

Salo shut them up. Not another shot got past him. For more than 47 minutes, he and the Swedes gave up no goals to America’s star-spangled, star-studded squad. The opening game for our dreamy little team was a nightmare. An unqualified failure. A flop. Bad day at Big Hat.

The final score was 4-2. We had the 2.

It was the same score we were defeated by 14 years ago in Sarajevo, which was the last time the United States lost an Olympic first-round game. We lost that one to Canada, using a couple of these same guys.

Sweden didn’t outshoot us. It just plain outplayed us.

“I wouldn’t call it a slap in the face,” Jeremy Roenick of the Phoenix Coyotes said after the loss. “Maybe a slap in terms of a wake-up, though.”

Things got so bad, when the game was over, John LeClair of the Philadelphia Flyers fired a puck at his own team’s empty net. He missed.

Oh, and then, with 0:00 on the big Big Hat clock, in one of those warm Olympic moments you don’t always see on CBS, an elbow belonging to Chris Chelios of the Chicago Blackhawks found its way to the person of Daniel Alfredsson of Sweden, who called Chelios a name in English that could easily be understood in Stockholm, believe me. Something a little meaner than a meatball.

Professionalism comes to the Winter Olympics.

This was not the way Team USA had intended to introduce itself. And it must not have been too happy a day at CBS headquarters in New York, either. A hot hockey team can mean high ratings. You can only show Hermann Maier crash through fences so many times.

A team that can’t beat Sweden is a hard sell.

“Sweden’s one of the best teams in the world,” Roenick insisted. “And we know we can beat them. We lost to a very good hockey team. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just a minor setback.”

That was the party line.

One down. No big deal. Get ‘em next time.

Brian Leetch of the Rangers put it this way: “We’re very lucky we’re in this format. We can get things straightened out. We can afford to lose one.”

Trouble is, the boys in red, white and blue were all eager to arrive in a blaze of glory.

For a fast few minutes, the Americans played as if there were no tomorrow. The pace was furious. Shots came at Salo so hot and heavy, he must have felt like a target in the biathlon. Chelios slapped home a goal. Mike Modano did likewise, 100 seconds later, a beauty.

“It all happened so quick!” the Coyotes’ Keith Tkachuk said. “Everything seemed so bang-bang. I felt robotic, watching everybody else zip by.”

Too much, too soon.

Before the game and soon after it began, Tony Amonte of the Blackhawks could tell the team had too much Olympic spirit. “I know we were a little nervous,” he said. “More than a little. There was a lot of buildup, a lot of emotion.”

Leetch also realized it right away. He said, “Yeah, everyone was excited. Some guys in the locker room after the first period were trying to calm them down. Like, hey, we’ve got a long way to go.”

True, theoretically.

Nagano has a week or so to go. But one more game like the one against Sweden, and the guys in that locker room won’t need to be calmed down from too much excitement. They will be leaning against their sticks, muttering, “We shut down the NHL for this?”