This U.S. hockey squad doomed from start

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And then he denied that the team could have used her leadership, saying, “We had plenty of leadership.”

He just didn’t have the kind that could actually score a goal when it was needed. Small oversight, I guess.

The second thing Smith didn’t do was keep the team together full-time as a unit, living together for the year before the games, working out every day, letting the athletes learn to work together as a unit until they played as one unit and not 20 individuals.

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The team he brought to Turin has very talented individuals. But against Sweden, as it had been throughout the tournament, the only thing the team was truly consistent at was missing connections.

The Americans played hard — very hard. It’s impossible and irresponsible to blame the players for what happened or to fault their efforts. They did the best job they could, and if they had had a true leader, someone who could have gotten the goal they needed, they’d be back in the finals, where we incorrectly thought they belonged.

But bad decisions prevented that from happening. Smith thought he was the program, and he was wrong. When he needed a hero, his was doing color commentary for NBC.

America can’t approve of the mess he made of this team. But the world is very appreciative. This is the third Olympiad for women’s hockey, and it’s the first time the final won’t be the United States against Canada. The Olympics are committed to the sport only through the 2010 Vancouver Games, after which it will be evaluated.

Until Friday in Turin, women’s hockey wasn’t anything you had to watch until the final game. But then an underdog Swedish team that had trained to almost daily viewings of 'Miracle', the story of the U.S. men’s triumph in 1980 over the mighty Soviets, rose up and said, “We can play this game, too.”

It will give the sport as a whole a tremendous boost, elevating the aspirations of other growing programs, including a rapidly improving Finnish team. And it may just save women’s hockey as an Olympic sport.

“It’s great for the sport of women’s hockey,” admitted Darwitz. “But it’s crappy right now.”

Mike Celizic writes regularly for MSNBCSports.com and is a freelance writer based in New York.

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