Wayne Gretzky and Mike Eruzione stood beside Sidney Crosby and Auston Matthews. Chants for Team USA and even Team Canada rained down at Boston’s TD Garden. Matthew Tkachuk beamed proudly at the scene around him. Referee Gord Dwyer dropped the puck for the opening faceoff, mic’d up, and uttered, “Let’s get ready for an epic battle.”
What? Where are we?
The scene was dream-like. It never would’ve felt remotely realistic when the NHL first announced the 4 Nations Face-Off a year ago. A four-team tournament in lieu of an All-Star Game, merely bridging the gap to the 2026 Olympics? We witnessed a staggering leap from “gLorifiED aLL-sTaR gAMe” criticisms all the way to U.S. President Donald Trump calling Team USA to wish them luck before the biggest game hockey game played on American soil since 1980. No one could’ve imagined the degree to which this tournament would obliterate expectations and captivate a continent.
But in hindsight, maybe we should have. We hadn’t seen true best-on-best hockey in nine years. So many of this generation’s greatest talents, from Connor McDavid to Auston Matthews to Nathan MacKinnon to Aleksander Barkov to Erik Karlsson, hadn’t been tossed in the blender wearing their countries’ colors all at once. Not only was it a revelation for fans to finally see them share the ice, but we quickly learned how much it was for the players, too. That was clear from the opening puck drop for Game 1 of Canada/Sweden last week. It was abundantly clear when Canada and USA fought three times in the opening nine seconds of last Saturday’s round-robin tilt, spurred by a Montreal crowd that had already worked itself into a frenzy booing the U.S. anthem in opposition of Trump.
And it carried over into an epic rematch in Thursday’s Final, which, all too fittingly, required overtime to solve and gave us a signature superstar moment. It was a back-and forth-affair, with the Canadians getting on the board first on a goal from Nathan MacKinnon through traffic on front of Connor Hellebuyck. The Americans surged back when coach Mike Sullivan placed Brady and Matthew Tkachuk on Auston Matthews’ wings; that line created havoc in front of Canada’s net, producing USA’s first and second goals, one from Brady Tkachuk on a knuckler and another from Jake Sanderson a rebound. Canada punched back after Mitch Marner drew two American defenders to him while setting up Sam Bennett for a roofjob wrister over Hellebuyck. After a tense, fast and defensively excellent third period on either side solved nothing, the rival nations required overtime just as they did at the 2010 Olympics. Crosby was the hero then, and in 2025 it was McDavid, taking the generational talent torch and etching himself in Canadian hockey history, sniping a wrist shot from the slot past Hellebuyck’s outstretched glove hand. McDavid had help, of course – Canada almost got tagged with a too-many-men on the ice penalty in OT, and Binnington put on an absolute clinic of desperation clutch saves in that extra frame, stopping what looked like the game-winning goal four times.
So, nine years after its last title defense, Canada got its “Aaaaand STILL…” moment.
“Just to see the reaction. Just to know what it means to us. I know it’s just a quick tournament, and it’s not an Olympic gold medal or anything like that, but it means the world to our group, as you can see,” McDavid told ESPN in the moments after the win. “Everybody battled so hard all week. It was special.
“Because it’s best on best. It’s four great countries going at it, obviously here in Boston going against an amazing American team and just finding a way. It wasn’t necessarily the prettiest, but we just found a way.”
Even in a tournament featuring just four countries, the two best and perhaps the three best in the world were playing, so the win feels legitimate in securing Canada’s bragging rights as the undisputed world champ. But if you’re American and lamenting the defeat, don’t dwell on it for too long. More than Canada, the sport as a whole won this tournament regardless of the result: the 4 Nations will go down as a surprising landmark moment for hockey and a crucial reminder that nothing grows the game more than best-on-best competition. An entire generation of American players was inspired because of the 1996 World Cup win. Most of us know Bobby Orr’s 1970 overtime goal for the Boston Bruins, sure, but ask a Canadian about Paul Henderson in 1972, Mario Lemieux in 1987 or Crosby in 2010. Ask an American about Eruzione in 1980. Czechia staged a musical based on its 1998 Olympic win. The international battles raise the stakes – and capture the eyeballs of casual fans – in a manner the club-versus-club matchups can’t. And maybe the NHL forgot that during its nine-year hiatus from best-on-best.
No more. We’ll get a full-blown Olympic tournament next year in Milan, giving us what will be a breathlessly anticipated Canada-USA rematch after Thursday’s heavyweight title fight while expanding the team pool, bringing in the likes of Czechia and Germany. We’ll see an NHL-run World Cup in 2028 featuring at least eight teams. We’ll have an Olympics on American turf in 2030. Heck, at some point, depending on if and when Russia halts its invasion of Ukraine, we could get another one of the elite hockey superpowers thrown back into the field.
For so many of the world’s best players, the 4 Nations was their first taste of this caliber of hockey. Players who’d competed in Stanley Cup Final Game 7s were calling the 4 Nations Final the biggest game of their lives. Even Drew Droughty, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, called the 4 Nations the fastest hockey he’d ever seen. Now they know what they’re in for going forward, and countless other top-end players who didn’t get to attend the 4 Nations will experience the same euphoria a year from now: David Pastrnak, Leon Draisaitl, even someone like Quinn Hughes who was eligible for the 4 Nations but unavailable.
The 4 Nations showed us what is possible; it also launched what will now finally be a new era of international hockey as one of four best-best events to be played in the next six years. That means more debates about roster selections; more rivalries, more casual fans being converted to hockey lovers; and maybe more instances in which that heavyweight belt changes hands. The result could be a heyday of international hockey we haven’t seen in a generation.
The 1970s and 1980s had Canada Cups. The early 2000s had consistent Olympic presences. The memories from those events are equally legendary and important for the sport. The 4 Nations reminded us how good it is for this type of hockey to be back, and it was just the beginning.
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