After narrowly escaping elimination in the quarterfinals, the Canadian men’s hockey team once again put fans through a rollercoaster ride of emotions in the semis on Friday.
Mikko Rantanen opened the scoring for Finland on a power play goal, followed by a short handed tally by Erik Haula early in the second period. Suddenly the pre-tournament favourites found themselves in a 2 goal deficit against a notoriously stingy Finnish defence corps.
No team had come back to win after trailing in back-to-back games in the elimination rounds of the Olympics previously. But the saving grace for the Canadian side was that there was still plenty of time left in the game for them to chip away at the lead.
Sam Reinhart would get the rally started after tipping in a point shot from Cale Makar to cut the deficit to 1. Then with under 10 minutes remaining in the third period, Shea Theodore would score the equalizer to send Canadian fans into a frenzy.
With the ice seemingly tilted in Canada’s favour at this point, Finland took a costly high sticking penalty with under 3 minutes remaining, leading head coach Jon Cooper to deploy his top power play unit to seek the go ahead goal. MacKinnon, McDavid and Celebrini would need the full 2 minutes on the man advantage before the Avalanche star was able to bury a low shot, short side on Finnish netminder Juuse Saros with 35 seconds remaining.
Finland would opt to challenge the play for an alleged offside zone entry a minute prior as a last ditch effort to nullify the goal. However, after a lengthy review, and a very close call that needed multiple angles to confirm it, the goal would stand, and Canada would punch its ticket to the gold medal game.
The Canadian side will now take on the winner of the United States vs. Slovakia which is set for later this afternoon.
Photo: Shaheen Karolia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.