Enduring echoes

Forty years gone now, and I am 24 years old and standing at a scorer's table in a high school gym in Elwood, Indiana, the official scorer turning the book around so I don't have to read it upside down, so I can take down the JV linescore and the names of all the players and who scored what.

Forty years -- half a lifetime -- and out on the floor the varsity teams are warming up and there's the low buzz of a hundred conversations coming down from the crowded bleachers, and just down the way the PA announcer leans into his mic and  clicks it on.

"I have an Olympic hockey score ..." he begins.

And then: "United States 4, Soviet Union 3!"

And the place erupts.

And the 24-year-old sportswriter, this half-a-lifetime-ago kid, raises his fist and shakes it.

And maybe people start chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" because that was a thing then, but I really can't remember for sure because it's all so long ago now.

And of course, never that long ago.

Never, because Mike Eruzione, the captain who scored the winning goal with exactly 10 minutes to play, is still around, still traveling around the country telling the story.

Never, because you can cue up "Miracle" anytime you want, see Kurt Russell channeling Herb Brooks in that ugly-ass 1980 suit, listen to the pregame speech some of us have practically memorized by now. Or cue up the last minute of the game and listen once more to Al Michaels' iconic call.

So much now we remember about the Miracle on Ice, because its echoes go on and on and on. No sports montage of the 20th century is complete without it; there is Babe Ruth pigeon-toeing around the bases and Jackie Robinson stealing home and Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali, and then, always, there is that scrum of American boys flinging their sticks and gloves to the heavens and piling atop one another as the clock hits zeroes.

It all comes back, then. How the American boys, a bunch of college kids and bush league lifers, had been embarrassed 10-3 by the mighty Soviet machine barely two weeks before. How they came within seconds of losing to Sweden in their Olympic opener. How the game against the Soviets was considered such a foregone conclusion it wasn't even aired live.

How those last ten minutes seemed to crawl past on broken glass as we watched the replay, even though we all knew how it was going to come out. And how later, it dawned on some of us that this happened on George Washington's birthday, and how cosmic was that?

Look. Maybe the Miracle was the greatest upset in sports history and maybe it wasn't, but it's clearly the one that endures like no other. It's clearly the one that most resonates, and always will, because it was such a perfect convergence of time and moment.

And that's perhaps the biggest miracle of all.