Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The greatest event almost no one saw live

I caught this from Richard Deitsch today.
Yo, America, this happened 32 years ago today:
Indeed it did.



I was 7, so I didn't watch the game, and to this day, I don't think I've ever watched the whole game from beginning to end. What I remember is hearing that our hockey team was playing this team from the "Soviet Union" (or it could have been "Russia"), and they were really good so we weren't supposed to beat them. I learned about the result the next morning when I got up to go to school.

(In a similar note from that same year, when someone told me Ted Kennedy had beaten Jimmy Carter, I thought it meant Carter wasn't going to be president anymore. I didn't know anything about primaries ... I was 7!)

But as this Bleacher Report article points out, unless you were actually in the building, you didn't see it when it happened, since the game was on tape delay. (Having grown up a few hours south of Lake Placid, I've been in the building since then, on one of my three trips there, and the town is one of my favorite places.)

I'm just old enough to remember the days when Olympic coverage was a few hours at night, a late-night show and thinking it was awesome that they were on all day on the weekends. Now, of course, between cable (which I grew up without) and the Internet, it's hard to avoid knowing what happened without trying really hard.

And to make all the people happy who have been complaining about tape delays, you'll be able to see everything live this year.

But since I work, I'll still probably wait for the primetime coverage, and if something like this happens, I'll still jump around my living room, even if it has been in the can for hours.

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