It’s heavier than you think. Olympic gold. It made its rounds through the Duck locker room before going back into Eric Strobel’s gym bag. “Lightening” Strobel was a member of the 1980 US Men’s Olympic hockey team that stole the gold from the big bad Ruskies at Lake Placid in the winter of 1980 and he just took this object d’arte out of his Wilson gym bag like it were an extra pair of socks.
The Gold medal match at Lake Placid in 1980 was a cold war spectacle of biblical proportion that is of course celebrated as one of the best under-dog performances in the history of sports (minus the Ducks beating the Hawks to win the Minnesota State Championship, of course). The Miracle, as it was called, immortalized a moment when college kids defied the Soviet empire to raise the banner of freedom in symbolic victory.
Back in the analog age, it seemed events like The Miracle lingered in collective consciousness, rippled, and remained. Before the 24 hour news cycle and internet and a break down of a shared sense of facts, we seemed to have moments that touched us and shaped us, even those of us who were too young to really experience the time they occurred. They made impressions on us that lasted because they belonged to a time that wasn’t ruled by being constantly “refreshed.”
All too often we chalk up this collective loss as an end to the age of innocence in our American idiom, but it feels like every age has claimed to have its innocence taken from them by some unseen, sudden calamity – even if it seems the digital take over and cloud-based storage models have made it all feel as if we are living in a state of permanent amnesia, the decay of meaning isn’t new, just accelerated. (In my humble opinion).
It’s all too easy to be cynical these days. I freely admit my guilt in indulging in the perverted pleasure of harping at the obvious negatives of our decline. But when I lose perspective from a feeling of powerlessness or outrage at the damage caused by exceptionalism or magical thinking and am in danger of feeling nothing is sacred anymore, I think back on the day I held the 1980 Olympic Gold medal in my hand.
Faith and belief are funny like that, they lock on an image of another time when the impossible was made possible and the path through the darkness looks suddenly lighter. Sure, the light is synthetic and mostly made from the mystique of amateur purity, nostalgia, and good versus evil mythology, but it does shine like gold nonetheless. I think that is why so many people love and celebrate the Mighty Ducks all these years later. Because we want to believe that we can rise and overcome almost any obstacle if we learn to fly together. We all feel like under dogs in our modern day, Capitalistic society. And that’s not some Marxist lefty BS, it’s just fact. It’s hard out there, the deck is stacked against us, and we have to fight to break through the economic cultural, or racial barriers that cripple us in the “race to get ahead.” Most of us come from some form of “D51.” And feel exiled from those on ‘the inside.’
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