Canada Beats U.S., 3-2, to Win Gold Medal in Women’s Hockey

All through the Beijing Games, the unchecked swagger of Canada’s women’s hockey team had been conspicuous for all to see — and to admire, fume over and fear.

There were the humiliations of the teams that would play for the bronze medal, the edgy digs at rivals, the nuanced critiques of the failed strategies to score on Ann-Renée Desbiens, the goaltender who made the Canadian crease a fortress.

The Canadians proved Thursday that all of it was justified: They overpowered the United States in the gold medal game, 3-2, and reclaimed the Olympic crown that the Americans had wrested away four years ago.

Canada’s victory was a display of strong-armed, swarming play, blended with a few doses of luck and an angsty, furious drive that started with the Olympic loss in 2018.

The outcome was one that the Canadians had tiptoed toward predicting. To them, a gold medal often seemed less about redemption and more about simply meeting a ceaselessly high standard.

“We’ve been playing so well that when we do play our way — and not focus on other teams or focus on who we’re playing — we are unstoppable,” said Natalie Spooner, a forward on her third Canadian Olympic team.

Canada appeared to strike about seven minutes into Thursday’s game, when the American goaltender Alex Cavallini deflected a puck and saw Spooner sweep it in with a powerful shot. The United States, though, challenged that Canada had been offside, an assessment the officials upheld.

“I owe you one,” Spooner said her teammate Sarah Nurse told her on the bench. “I was offside.”

Thirty-five seconds later, the goal arrived: After Canada won a face-off, Nurse took a pass, spun and scored.

Canada doubled its lead later in the period on a shot by Marie-Philip Poulin, the Canadian captain who was playing in her fourth Games, and pushed it to 3-0 when Poulin scored again midway through the second.

Hilary Knight scored a short-handed goal for the United States late in the second, promising that the Americans would at least avoid the indignity of being shut out when a gold medal was for the taking.

A power-play goal with 13 seconds to play made the final score close. By then, though, the Canadian team knew its victory was assured.

So did the Americans.

“We wanted to just get a lot of pucks in there and actually have a lot of bodies, and I don’t think we did enough of a great job of that,” U.S. forward Abby Roque said.

Thursday’s spectacle was familiar ground, the sixth gold medal game between Canada and the United States since women’s hockey became an Olympic…