Desperate for another miracle: In a world of fear and loathing, can we still believe in miracles?

February 21, 2020 – Right about now as I sit her typing, 40 years ago to the minute, I was walking out of the newsroom after a long day when all hell broke loose; the teletype machines started clicking away, preceded by a series of bells to alert editors that something of transcendent importance was happening somewhere on the planet.

The bells foreshadowed the next day’s headlines. Usually there were 10 to 15 bells for a flash news item, but the Associate Press wire service operators of that era had to type a “bell” symbol to trigger each ring, and in the excitement of a big story the number could vary.

All I can say for certain is that it sure seemed like there were way more than 15 bells that evening.

And then I read the lead of the story coming over the wire, dateline LAKE PLACID, NY.

So yeah, I know exactly where I was when news broke that an unheralded tapestry of college kids had just upset the mighty Soviet hockey club, until then the most successful international hockey team in history, by the score of 4-3. That’s when I started believing in miracles.

The outcome so unlikely and so profound for all its symbolic meaning to the two superpower nations those teams represented that at the end of the century the AP and Sports Illustrated magazine called it the single greatest event in sports of the entire 20^th century.

I was a young reporter working my first newspaper gig on the city desk of the Lansing State Journal. But I wasn’t that long removed from my six-year stint as a Russian linguist assigned to a unit attached to the National Security Agency. As a veteran of the Cold War, I understood in no uncertain terms the historical magnitude of this moment – and it had absolutely nothing to do with sports.

Fast forward 15 years, which for me included a few more years in Lansing, another three in Chicago working for that AP wire service, then home to Detroit. I had spent a year on the City Desk at the Free Press before moving to the “toy department” – the Sports Desk, where I’d been assigned to cover the Detroit Red Wings.

And in their dressing room in the mid-1990s, there happened to be a player who had participated in that game at Lake Placid. A player on both sides of that miracle game. And they shared lockers right next to one another!

It seems cruel now as I reminisce, but I’d occasionally approach Mike Ramsey, who at 19 was the youngest player by a full year on that Gold Medal team. I’d ask him what it was like to be on the ice in those final, frenetic seconds, as broadcaster Al Michaels shouted, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

As Ramsey spoke, I could see the man next to him, Slava Fetisov, getting redder and redder, muttering expletives in two languages. Inevitably, it would end with Fetisov suggesting that if those two teams played 100 more games, the Soviets would win 100 of them. He got no argument from Ramsey. That’s why they called it a miracle, I mentioned as a way to resolve any residual hard feelings I might have revived.

The harder part, and in my view the far more interesting part of that story, was getting Fetisov – the Gordie Howe of Russian Hockey – to describe what it was like to return home with silver medals and not gold. Always a good and receptive interview, Fetisov would never say much, other than to acknowledge the great shame at losing to the Americans – the one thing their Soviet bosses back home said they would not tolerate.

A few years later, Ramsey was gone, but Fetisov and four of his comrades from the former Soviet Union helped to lead the Red Wings to their first of two straight Stanley Cup titles. Suddenly, the Cold War seemed like a distant memory. Russians were teammates, local heroes, sports icons.

It felt like a different world. A better world. Sport, as Fetisov has so often proudly professed, had become a bridge between two cultures that badly needed one. When I accompanied three of Detroit’s Russian Five to Moscow for the Stanley Cup’s first-ever visit to Russia, all I had to do is mention to people there that I was from Detroit and I never had to pay for a drink.

Some of the most skeptical, distrusting people on the planet were suddenly infatuated with America and Americans.

And now they are not. A couple of decades later, the world has changed again. We’ve somehow retrenched. A new Cold War feels inevitable – if not already being waged.

Forty years after that unbelievable victory by those young Americans, our world – especially the relationship between these two superpowers – is at a crossroads again. What this world desperately needs is another miracle. Or at least some kind of bridge.