Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, the extraordinary upset by the U.S. Olympic hockey team over the Soviet Union at Lake Placid, New York. The game foreshadowed a decade in which the United States would pull off a similar, come-from-behind victory in the Cold War, with President Reagan playing the part of Herb Brooks to the country. A couple of years ago, Oliver North wrote this commentary about the game after Herb Brooks' death. North believes that the game itself was a "turning point" in the Cold War. Maybe. But I don't think the tide had turned — even for American morale. The disaster at Desert One, the abortive rescue of the hostages held in Iran, still lay ahead. The flood of Cuban refugees in the Mariel boatlift was yet to come. And the year would conclude with the assassination of John Lennon in New York City...

Many people know that the Soviet Union's attendance at Lake Placid was somewhat in doubt. President Jimmy Carter had announced that the United States would boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow that year in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the Soviets elected to retaliate with a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles games instead). But did you know that Ronald Reagan was one of the leaders in calling for a boycott of the Moscow Games? Not in 1979/1980, when it seemed a silly and understated response to events in Afghanistan. But in 1978. In his Sept. 19, 1978 radio address, Reagan compared the scheduling of the Moscow Olympics to the scheduling of Berlin in 1936:

[N]ow we know they were building the ovens at Belsen & Auschwitz while the crowds were cheering in the Olympic Stadium. Our leaders in the Western World have spoken out strongly against the pretended trials of men like Shcharansky and Ginzburg who are now rotting in the labor camps — the Soviet Gulag. They'll be rotting there in 1980 when the Olympic Torch, the symbol of sportsmanship and honor, is lighted to open the games. What would happen if the leaders of the Western World told the IOC & the Soviet Union that torch must be lit in some other country unless and until the Soviets honor the Helsinki Agreement?

...

[If[ we participate in the games anyway, what do we say to our young athletes about honor?

Those who believe that Jimmy Carter was the great defender of human rights in the 1970s should have paid more attention to Reagan.

Incidentally, ESPN Classic will be airing the original broadcast of the U.S./U.S.S.R. hockey game tonight at 8; and the gold medal game against Finland on Thursday night.

Update: Watched the rebroadcast on ESPN Classic tonight. While the interruptions for commentary from Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, and [Soviet goalie] Vladislav Tretiak were interesting, it definitely disrupted the flow of the game -- as did the minutes cut out of each period. I don't know if those cuts were because the original ABC broadcast was abridged in the same places (although, like John Hinderaker, I was in South Bend, Indiana, for the game, I don't remember those details), or because ESPN Classic needed to make it shorter. I hope it's the former but suspect it's the latter.

I've seen a number of retrospective features (and highly recommend the movie "Miracle"), but it had been quite a while since I'd seen Jim McKay's emotional postgame commentary from the studio, in which he described being at dinner in a restaurant in Lake Placid when the final score came in. To paraphrase: Everyone immediately stood and spontaneously started singing the national anthem. The last time I saw anything like it was, was, probably not since World War Two.

The postgame, outdoor interview of Eruzione, Craig, and someone else (maybe Johnson) was also something else - with the crowd in the background singing "God Bless our Hockey Team" to the tune of God Bless America.