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A penalty for high-sticking gave the U.S. a man advantage and Johnson rammed in his second goal, with an assist from Boston University's Dave Silk, to tie the game. Just 81 sec. later, Mike Eruzione, the team captain, drove home a rebound for what proved to be the winning goal. Across the American night, millions of living rooms and bars reverberated with a noise of deep satisfaction, and President Carter invited the whole team to the White House, along with the rest of the U.S. Olympians, for lunch.
In figure skating, there were occasional dazzling moments, but much of it was disappointing. At Lake Placid, the ice belonged to Heiden and the hockey players.
Reigning Men's World Champion Vladimir Kovalev of the Soviet Union dropped out of the singles figure-skating competition, supposedly disabled by flu. The best American hope, Charlie Tickner, 26, is normally a stylish and energetic skater, but all week he seemed curiously flat. In the free-skating competition, he suffered some awkward technical problems with a triple jump, but his main difficulty seemed to involve something spiritual: he rarely displayed any of the fire and joy he has given his skating in recent years.
Tickner did take the bronze, but the men's gold went to Britain's Robin Cousins, 22, who brought to Placid the elegant and fluid style that had won him his first European championship several weeks earlier. But even he did not skate with his usual relaxed confidence. He faltered on one of the triple jumps in his undemanding program; his gold medal was a triumph of style over substance.
The silver went to East Germany's Jan Hoffmann, who made no mistakes in his athletic free-skating program but left the overall impression of an expertly twirling oak tree. Many of the figure skaters, in fact, seemed to be phoning in their performances from Albany. That was not so of Americans David Santee, 22, who had made a fetish out of the movie boxer Rocky, and tiny Scott Hamilton, 21, who ricocheted around the arena like an exuberant puppy. The two gave the men's competition badly needed shots of enthusiasm; they placed fourth and fifth.
The best U.S. hope for a U.S. figure skating gold medal after Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner dropped out was Linda Fratianne, 19, but she got off to a shaky start, finishing third in the compulsory figures. Fratianne complained that West Germany's Dagmar Lurz, who finished second, had been rated too high. "I went out and saw her third figure and the second circle of her loop was short, fat and off-axis," said Linda. Her coach, Frank Carroll, said irritably that "the judges always put Dagmar in there as a buffer between Linda and East Germany's Anett Poetzsch, so that Linda has to come from behind to win." A two-time world and four-time U.S. champion, Fratianne is an excellent but vaguely apprehensive skater; she has only rarely been able to disperse the little cloud of worry that hovers over her performances. She had come to Lake Placid as the favorite, but now she had to beat both Poetzsch and Lurz.