There are times in sport when beauty is obvious. A gymnast floats. A skater lands as if gravity signed a waiver. A downhill racer carves a line so clean it looks drawn by a compass. And then there are times when beauty arrives wearing a mouthguard.
The United States women’s hockey team may be the best in the world right now. Not the most photogenic. Not the most choreographed. The best. Through five games at these Milan Cortina Olympics, they have outscored their opponents 26 to 1. They shut out Canada for the first time in 41 Olympic matches. They have not merely won. They have administered.
Consider the captain. Hilary Knight grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, started skating at five, and told people early that she intended to play in the Olympics. She was not being fanciful. She was being accurate. At Wisconsin, she scored 143 goals, more than any player in program history, men’s or women’s, and won two national championships. She made her first Olympic team in 2010, at twenty, the youngest player on the roster, and scored her first Olympic goal in Vancouver while most of her future teammates were still learning to read a power play.
Sixteen years later, she is still here. She is 36 now, playing in her fifth Olympic Games, the first American hockey player of any gender to reach that number. She has tied the all-time U.S. record for Olympic goals with 14 and matched Jenny Potter’s career record of 32 Olympic points. She captains the Seattle Torrent in the Professional Women’s Hockey League. She has won ten gold medals at the World Championships, more than any hockey player in history, and holds the tournament records for goals, assists, and points. In 2014, she became the first female skater to practice with an NHL team when the Anaheim Ducks invited her onto the ice. When she scored against Finland last week to tie the Olympic goals record, she told reporters she had no idea she was close. “I just love scoring,” she said. “It’s a little-kid moment. When you score, it’s pure excitement.” She has been having little-kid moments on the international stage since the year Twitter launched. This is her final Olympics. She has said so. And she is playing like someone who intends to leave nothing behind.
Behind her, the next generation has already arrived, and its face belongs to Caroline Harvey. She is 23, a senior at Wisconsin, and she plays defense the way Bobby Orr played it: as an offensive weapon that happens to start from the back. At these Games she leads all players in points with seven through five matches, posting two goals and five assists with a plus-10 rating that suggests she is on the ice for almost everything good that happens. She earned the nickname “KK” as a toddler because her older sister could not pronounce Caroline. At three, she told her aunt she would make the 2022 Olympic team. She was not being fanciful either.
She made it at 19, the youngest player on the roster, and came home with silver. But Beijing was hard. She struggled with confidence, uncertain how to find her place among the players she had idolized. Head coach John Wroblewski pulled her aside before the 2022 World Championship and reminded her that she had already accomplished everything a player could accomplish by 19. He told her to play aggressively, without fear of mistakes.
She listened. She won Best Defenseman honors at the 2023 and 2025 World Championships, becoming only the second defender in history to lead the United States in points at a major international tournament. Angela Ruggiero, the Hall of Fame defenseman who set the standard for American blueliners across four Olympic cycles, watched Harvey this week and called her game “skilled aggression.” She added: “You have to have that killer attitude. To me, that’s the sign of a champion. You can learn the skills. You can learn the systems. That mentality is something else.”
Harvey will be the top pick in the PWHL Draft when this tournament ends. Laila Edwards, the 22-year-old from Cleveland Heights making history as the first Black woman on a U.S. Olympic hockey roster, will likely follow soon after. The infrastructure now exists to catch them. That is new. That matters.
This team plays the game the way hockey was intended to be played. They close space in the neutral zone without panic. They change lines without surrendering tempo. They move the puck with purpose, not flourish. Their goaltenders do not flail; they absorb. Their defenders do not merely clear; they initiate. It is a mature team, a finished team. There is nothing accidental about them.
In a tournament that often trades in spectacle, this group trades in structure. Their excellence is not ornamental. It is architectural, built shift by shift, check by check, decision by decision. They are not skating toward applause. They are skating toward inevitability. And yet the noise around them feels softer than it should.
Perhaps it is because hockey, especially when played this way, resists easy packaging. There are no sequins in the corners. No slow-motion close-ups of airborne grace. There is collision. There is discipline. There is a bench that understands championships are not won on a single rush but on forty minutes of quiet superiority. This is not a team asking to be loved for its story. It is a team demanding to be respected for its play.
Four years ago in Beijing, Canada’s Marie-Philip Poulin scored twice to beat the Americans 3 to 2 in the gold medal game. It was her fourth consecutive Olympic final with a goal, a feat no hockey player, male or female, had matched. The loss stung. These things always sting. But what followed was instructive. The Americans did not fragment. They did not drift into separate leagues and separate agendas, as women’s hockey had done before. They fought for something better, and in January 2024 they got it: the Professional Women’s Hockey League, backed by Dodgers owner Mark Walter and tennis pioneer Billie Jean King, with real salaries, real benefits, and real commitment. Within its first season the league set a world attendance record for women’s hockey, 21,000 fans in Montreal for a regular-season game. Knight plays for the Seattle Torrent now. The league has expanded to eight teams. It is no longer an experiment. It is a destination.
This is the context that hovers beneath every shift in Milan. The American women are not just chasing a gold medal. They are validating an entire infrastructure. They are proving that women’s hockey, given proper support, produces excellence that rivals any sport on earth.
If we are honest, sport has always struggled with a certain paradox. We claim to admire excellence above all else. We teach our children that performance is what counts. But we are sometimes more comfortable celebrating what is graceful than what is grinding. Hockey does not twirl. It grinds. This American roster grinds beautifully.
There is a line depth that feels unfair, a defensive calm that borders on arrogant, a physical edge that reminds you skill and strength are not opposites but partners. They do not play as if hoping to surprise anyone. They play as if fully aware of who they are.
Best in the world is not a marketing slogan. It is a standard. If this team meets that standard, and the evidence so far suggests they will, then they deserve what we so freely give to others who wear the same flag. They deserve analysis, not just highlights. They deserve conversation, not just coverage. They deserve the full-throated cheer that accompanies American dominance in any arena. Not because they are women. Not because they are inspirational. Because they are excellent.
The crest on their chest is the same one that draws tears in summer and winter, in pool and on track. It does not change because the sport is colder. It does not change because the game is played behind boards instead of on balance beams. They are Team USA too.
There is something quietly patriotic about recognizing excellence wherever it lives. It does not ask whether the performance is pretty. It asks whether it is superior. On the ice, superiority has a sound. It is the clean snap of tape to tape. It is the thud of a check that ends a rush. It is the silence that follows when an opponent realizes there is no easy lane left.
That sound belongs to this team. They are the best in the world. The jersey says United States. That should be enough. Monday brings the semifinal. Gold is three wins away. Let’s cheer them on like we mean it.