The overtime outcome might not have been what most Americans wanted from Thursday night’s clash between the U.S. and Canadian hockey teams, but the unavoidable images from the game itself had to be giving the libs at ESPN heartburn.
The network that long ago decided to infuse a leftist worldview into its supposedly sports-centric format was forced repeatedly to broadcast hockey fans sporting the trademark of President Donald Trump supporters.
And there was nothing ESPN could do about it.
Seated behind Team USA’s bench, and coach Mike Sullivan, were fans wearing the red ballcaps emblazoned with the words “Make America Great Again” that are effectively a symbol of the Trump movement.
There are MAGA hats everywhere. pic.twitter.com/AW9rXAvDzM
— George (@BehizyTweets) February 21, 2025
The fans clearly knew what they were doing when they put the hat at center stage like this.
Check out the grin on this guy:
You can’t escape MAGA at the #USAvsCAN hockey game
— Jaime (@jsansonnn) February 21, 2025
Given the strained relations between the Trump administration and the effete leadership of Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau — a man already on his way out the door — the game took on a heightened importance beyond a simple hockey face-off.
(Trump has a way of doing that.)
And while the Canadian 3-2 victory with a goal in overtime was far from ideal, it’s a good bet the prominence of MAGA hats at rinkside bothered American liberals more than the loss of their own home country.
This guy probably spoke for a lot of them:
usa hockey fans wearing maga hats make me want to emigrate
— Dungeon Messi (@tyschalter) February 21, 2025
The game was just two days shy of the anniversary of the Feb. 22, 1980, “Miracle on Ice” at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.
But to be clear, it wasn’t even close to that event, in terms of the stakes. Any American who remembers those days knows that. (Heck, any American who’s even seen the 2004 movie “Miracle,” a magnificent retelling of the story, would know it.)
That 1980 game pitted American college students against the mighty Soviet Union, at a time when American international standing and domestic morale was in the pits — thanks largely to the Jimmy Carter presidency.
The win wasn’t even the gold-medal round, but it was a shot in the arm to a country that sorely needed it.
(What the country needed even more was a president like Ronald Reagan, but that didn’t come until almost a year later.)
This was Canada, a country that’s generally irritating and occasionally infuriating, but still Canada.
Its hockey fans might be boorish enough to boo “The Star-Spangled Banner” (basically begging for a reprisal from American fans) but the country itself isn’t anywhere close to an enemy of the United States (and might even be part of it someday, to hear Trump tell it).
And what the United States needs now isn’t a morale-boosting shot in the arm with a hockey win over Canada — it’s an energetic administration from Donald Trump, setting to fix the multiple disasters created by former President Joe Biden (a man whose failures compare easily with Carter’s).
The tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump in November knew it — it’s why he won the popular vote as well as every swing state.
The MAGA fans on hand in Boston’s TD Garden knew it too.
Showing that had to be painful to ESPN, a network that has cultivated an anti-conservative brand of politics that’s an embarrassment to its actual mission — being the undisputed “Worldwide Leader in Sports.”
But there wasn’t anything it could do about it.
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