Translated material
Hitchcock is resting
The hockey team gave Russians personal happiness and national unity
“It was a great game,” the head coach of the Canadian national team, a middle-aged, overweight man, Ken Hitchcock, the namesake of another overweight man, perhaps the best director of psychological thrillers in the history of world cinema, Alfred, will say at a press conference after the final match of the World Hockey Championship in Quebec. Hitchcock. “It was a great victory,” everyone who supported the Russian team will add.The main meaning of such long-awaited, hard-fought victories is the feeling, albeit short-lived, for a couple of hours or a couple of days, of true unity of the people of the victorious country. Hockey players, coaches, officials, the president and mechanic, fans of the Russian national team in the stands of the arena in Quebec and in provincial Russian cities, where our triumphant players mainly “come from,” suddenly became a people. Exactly at the moment when daredevil Ilya Kovalchuk scored the fifth goal for the Canadians in the third minute of overtime.
Hitchcock, who is Alfred, is resting: it was almost four hours of the kind of psychological thriller for which hundreds of millions of people in the world watch hockey. Only Game and Life can write such a scenario. The thriller began almost an hour before the match, when the bus with the Russian team was not allowed to enter the arena and the hockey players had to walk for quite a long time. The thriller continued when Russia scored against the Canadians in almost the first attack. But weren’t the Canadians’ three return goals in the first period a thriller, one of which flew into the goal of - now we can safely say: the outstanding Russian goalkeeper - Evgeniy Nabokov after the Canadian clearly knocked down our Maxim Sushinsky?
Hitchcock, who is Ken, is known in the hockey world as a cautious coach who plays defensively. And at the home World Championship, his team decided to turn Canadian hockey into Brazilian football with its reckless principle “you will score as much as you can, and we will score as much as you want.” But this dashing Canadian hockey disappeared right in the middle of regulation time, when the Canadians again brought the advantage to two goals - 4:2. Here Ken Hitchcock returned to his place, and his team decided to defend the victory on defense. And the Russians, who played the fastest and most furiously throughout this tournament, unleashed this speed and fury on the founders of hockey with the panache of the heroes of Soviet films about the Great Patriotic War.
And, of course, a real thriller must have a main character. Alfred Hitchcock's hero never saved the world, he tried to get rid of internal fears. The born scorer Ilya Kovalchuk, with all the daring of his character, could not help but have the fear of leaving the World Championship without a single goal. But “saving the world” is also in his character. Overcoming internal fear and “saving the world” happened together: first, when the protagonist of the thriller equalized the score shortly before the end of regular time, and then scored in overtime.
But the hero in the thriller, which is composed by life itself and big sport as part of this life, cannot be alone. The hero was “Sensei Bykov,” who captained the national team in 1993, when we won the world hockey championship for the first and last time in the modern history of Russia. He trusted Kovalchuk throughout the tournament, but in the third period of the decisive match he put him in the other top three, where he became not a carrier of shells, but the first star, as he was used to. All the defenders and forwards of the Russian national team were heroes, because they played - how they lived, fought on the ice - how they breathed. And what a hero goalkeeper Evgeniy Nabokov is, who flew to the team at the first call after his club, the San Jose Sharks, was eliminated from the Stanley Cup in a match where there were four (!) overtimes. His calmness and skill, without a hint of posturing, became the foundation and support of our exploits in attack.
Today the Russian national hockey team will be received by President Dmitry Medvedev, whose hands should still remember the UEFA Cup won by Zenit last Wednesday. To celebrate, Tver Governor Dmitry Zelenin immediately promoted Ilya Kovalchuk, who was born in Tver, to the rank of “Honorary Citizen of the Tver Region.” For Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk, the same Tver and other non-capital cities where our champions are from, victory in Canada is a special joy: in these cities, hockey is perhaps the main spectacle for ordinary people. And for politicians and officials, by their very nature, it is important to pose with the real winners.
…In every person’s life there are not many truly happy moments. On Monday night, millions of Russians, complete strangers to each other, were sincerely happy for the same reason. We, it was we, and not just the hockey players and coaches, who won this World Hockey Championship. This victorious finale with the Canadians seemed like our small personal victory in life. And people shouted at the top of their voices, waved Russian flags from their cars, and felt like brothers and sisters. And at that moment it seemed to all of them, to all of us, that we were not living in the world in vain.