The Night the Russians Came to Erie
The Erie Blades got home at half past seven in the morning. They had lost 5-3 in Baltimore the night before against the Baltimore Clippers and spent the dark hours on a bus, north through Maryland and Pennsylvania, and by the time they reached Erie on Thursday, February 7, 1980, the sun was up. That night, they were scheduled to play what was the best hockey team in the world at the time. The Soviet national team was on its way to Lake Placid for the Olympics, but would make a stop in Erie, Pennsylvania before the Games.
In fifteen days a roster of American college players would beat the Soviets 4-3 in the most famous American hockey game ever played, but nobody in Erie knew that yet, and nobody would have believed it if you told them that's what was going to happen. What people in Erie knew in early February of 1980 was that the team arriving at the Erie County Field House, out where Route 8 meets Interstate 90, had beaten the best of the National Hockey League in a three-game series the previous winter, and were the four-time defending Olympic champions. The Soviets had won gold in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976. The last country to take an Olympic gold medal away from them was the United States, with the Forgotten Miracle at Squaw Valley in 1960.