Canada coach has no time for 'shoulder drops,' but women's team insists they'll be better next time

Chris Jones reports from Milan.

Women’s hockey arrived on the big stage at Milano Santagiulia on Tuesday night, when Canada and the U.S. renewed their endless rivalry. After a 5-0 win for the increasingly dominant Americans, after the arena fell silent long before it should have, their meetings have started to feel more hopeless than heated.

“You try to decipher why a game like that happens,” head coach Troy Ryan said after. “We don’t expect any of this to be easy. We just have to make sure we’re much better than we were tonight.”

Marie-Philip Poulin, Canada’s captain, did not play after being injured in Monday’s distant-seeming win over Czechia. But even her mighty presence would have done little to change a miserable outcome, the latest in an unbroken string of Canadian defeats.

The Americans won 4-3 in overtime at last year’s world championships. They went on to take all four games of November’s and December’s Rivalry Series by a combined score of 24-7.

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They’ve now swept their slate of preliminary games in Milan, against the top-seeded teams, by a combined score of 20-1. They are young, fast, physical, and fully weaponized. Each time they’ve played the Canadians lately, it feels as though they’ve just remembered another slight to avenge.

“I wasn’t expecting that from our group, honestly,” Canadian forward Julia Gosling said. “I guess the pressure kind of got to us a little. Next time around we’re going to be confident and really take it to them.”

As naïve as Gosling’s optimism sounded, there is, perhaps, one reason for it — the same sliver of hope offered to any team that makes up its mind to find it.

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