for Americans 35 and older

Good raw YouTube footage of USA-Soviet Union hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics. They’ve spliced the radio play-by-play over the video, which is much better than ABC’s coverage of it. Non-Americans watching this footage will have to excuse the sentimentally patriotic captions at the front.

The truly amazing thing, as I remember back to that day in February of ’80 (when I was still 11 years old), is that the game was not shown on live television. They only showed it on tape-delay that night. In the pre-ESPN era, strange things of that sort were taken to be normal. One of those NBA Finals series in the late 1970’s was also not covered live, though admittedly the NBA was scraping rock bottom at that point. And yet, heavyweight title fights were carried on live national TV, unlike now.

In any case, this is a pretty exciting 10 minutes of hockey.