BOSTON — The tournament has taken on a life of its own. 4 Nations has captured the hearts and minds of not only hockey fans on both sides of the border, but those who in normal times don’t even give the sport a glancing nod.

4 Nations has become 2 Superpowers. The United States of America and Canada will meet in the tournament final on Thursday in the most highly anticipated hockey game on U.S. soil since Like Placid in 1980.

The Yanks won the rowdy prelim on Saturday in Montreal while chiseling 0:09 into history, but they remain challengers to their neighbors’ generational best-on-best supremacy. Not a single team member has ever won an international game of this magnitude. None has even played in one of this importance.

This is the game of these Born in the USA hockey players’ lives.