This time, America's team is dealt a tough loss

Probably no single victory in the history of United States sports is more fondly remembered or more lovingly referred to than the 1980 "Miracle on Ice."

Time and time again it's voted as the high-water mark of 20th century American team achievement, a feel-good story for eternity.

Just the mention of that phrase -- Miracle on Ice -- conjures what happened at Lake Placid in the Winter Olympics when the U.S. hockey team shocked the world and upset the Soviets.

Perhaps no photo is more instantly recognizable than Jim Craig wrapped in an American flag after the gold-medal victory over Finland.

While it's possible that the name of the coach of that team does not spring to mind, if I mention it -- Herb Brooks -- you'd have to smile.

And some of the other names will come back to you -- like Craig's, like Mike Eruzione's, like Mark Johnson's.

Minute in the spotlight

None of these players made a big splash in the NHL. Some of them barely dented the league. Some of them have had personal tragedy in their lives. Most of them now are all but forgotten except to their friends and family. But collectively that team has never faced sorrow and mortality like they do today, the day after learning that Herb Brooks had been killed in a single-car accident in Minnesota, just north of the Twin Cities.

There have been reunions before of that Olympic team, and they have all been high-spirited and joyful. There have been movies and television shows based on that Olympic team -- indeed, there is a movie in the works right now -- and all have been laudatory, patriotic and evocative. But at Herb Brooks's funeral, that Olympic team will gather for the first time in pain and melancholia to remember the coach who motivated them by deliberately being so rough on them that their anger toward him fueled their superlative play. In a sense, this will be the first loss the team has ever suffered.

He left his legacy already

It doesn't matter where else Herb Brooks coached. It doesn't matter if his teams, whether they were national teams, college teams or pro teams, won or lost titles. It doesn't matter that Herb Brooks succeeded anywhere else and failed anywhere else.

What matters most about Herb Brooks is the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. That one team gave him his defining moment as a coach in the way that one Super Bowl against the Colts gave Joe Namath his defining moment as a player. And nothing Namath did before or after that one moment meant anything because his legend was guaranteed in that Super Bowl in Miami.

Brooks knew the moment when it was upon him, telling the U.S. players in that upstate New York locker room before the game: "You're meant to be here. This moment is yours. You're meant to be here at this time."

For those of you in your teens or 20s who can't imagine two superpowers like the United States and the Soviet Union and the threat of war hanging in the air like a low cloud on a hillside, you probably wonder what the fuss is about. Well, in those days, for the United States to beat the Soviet Union in any athletic endeavor was a big deal. In those days, in those Olympics, we had amateurs and they had pros.

Now, of course, everybody has pros. But in those days, for an American hockey team made up of college kids to beat the mighty Soviet team made up of seasoned pros ... well, that was unthinkable.

And to do it in the Olympics, the greatest stage of them all ... well, that was impossible. Of course, that's why Al Michaels, giving the live call at Lake Placid, exuberantly asked at the end of the game against the Soviet Union, "Do you believe in miracles?" What made that moment even more euphoric extended well beyond a hockey game. Because in those days our collective morale had flatlined; we were 110 days into the American hostage-taking by Iran. So we really needed this.

At the center of all of this, shoveling coal into the furnace, pulling all the levers, turning on the lights, drawing back the curtain and running the risk of alienating his own players, there in that hideously loud plaid sports jacket was Herb Brooks, a regular guy from St. Paul whom nobody had heard of two weeks before the Olympics began and whom everybody learned of as the Olympics went on.

Now, after you read the news Tuesday that Herb Brooks was killed in a car accident Monday, you don't so much think of Herb Brooks as you think of that hockey team. You can't so much recall his face as you can recall the moment of the medal ceremony, when the captain of that team, Mike Eruzione, called all the players up onto the podium with him as "The Star-Spangled Banner" played and the American flag was raised high above the ice, so high that it seemed everyone in the world could see it.

You don't so much review Brooks's career as you look back on where you were at that moment when the United States Olympic hockey team scored one of the greatest upsets in the history of sports.

If you are of a certain age, you might remember how during the gold-medal game against Finland, people who were driving in their cars in the middle of a Sunday afternoon spontaneously turned on their lights and honked their horns, ushering in a great celebration on the roads of America, that incredibly intricate network linking Americans from town to town, city to city, state to state.

On that one Sunday, Herb Brooks delivered to Americans one of the sweetest moments they ever have had in sports. And so now, with Brooks's passing on one of those American roads, we pause to remember.

Tony Kornheiser is a columnist for the Washington Post.