COMMENTARY

By Tim Dahlberg

updated 5:24 p.m. ET Feb. 20, 2006

TURIN, Italy - There’s crying in women’s hockey.

Plenty of it, too, if Monday night at the Olympic arena was any indication.

The Finns were crying because they lost a chance at an Olympic medal. The Americans were crying, too, for many different reasons.

There were tears of joy from a game well played. Tears of happiness for winning a bronze medal. Tears of sadness for being the last time some would play a game for real.

And more than a few tears that they had to watch the gold medal game instead of play in it.

“It’s what being an athlete is all about,” forward Kim Insalaco said. “Ups and downs.”

The Olympics weren’t supposed to end this way for this team. From the time they opened training camp last August until just a few days ago, there was never a doubt that the United States would be playing Canada for the gold medal.

No other teams had ever beaten either the United States or Canada since they first began playing women’s world championships in 1990. There was no reason to believe it was going to happen here, until the Americans forgot that the game still has to be played on the ice and were beaten in the semifinals by Sweden.

There were tears that night, too. After they flowed came the grim realization that there was still a game to be played, even if it wasn’t the one they expected.

Beating the juggernaut Canadian team would have been hard. Playing well against Finland seemed almost as insurmountable a task for the dispirited Americans.

“We were living in disbelief the last two days,” Insalaco said. “We had to get over it.”

Slide show   Emotional Moments Feb. 26: See photos of athletes' highs and lows from Sunday.

Get over it they did, with Julie Chu scoring just 2:32 into the game and Katie King adding a hat trick after that in the final game of her career. Finland never came close to scoring, and the 4-0 win was so ho-hum that it only served to dramatize how the Americans weren’t supposed to lose to Sweden in the first place three days earlier.

The 20 players who formed this team already knew that, of course. They understood that they had squandered a chance that comes around only once in four years for some — and will never come around again for others.

They stood on the ice afterward, celebrating quietly. They seemed reluctant to leave the same ice where the Canadians would win the gold medal only a few hours later.

Slide show   Pictures of the Day Check out Sunday's best Olympic images.

Insalaco cried as the reality of her last game set in, and she searched the stands to blow a kiss and say thank you to her parents. Jenny Potter’s 5-year-old daughter, Madison, came down and her mother held her in her arms on the ice.

“You won a medal?” Madison asked. “Can I have it?”

The players hadn’t talked about it much before, but for some it would be their last game. Living in dorms and out of suitcases while traveling the world to games gets old after a while. Some had been on all three Olympic teams since women’s hockey became a medal sport in Nagano in 1998.

King was one of those. She had a boyfriend and a job as an assistant coach at Boston College. It was time to hang up the skates.

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