Don’t forget the peanut farmer was in the White House, saying that America would never be great again. The miracle on ice proved him wrong, and I think helped Ronald Reagan in highlighting the potential of Americans. I was 14 at the time and we were at the Illinois state swimming championship. When the score was announced the entire crowd stood up and sang the Star Spangled Banner. I will never forget that feeling, and we rushed home to watch the game on tape delay. On Sunday we watched the gold medal game live. It really drove home what it meant to be an American, and to show that we didn’t have to put up with a putz like Carter in office.
One of the books I read on this subject described how American goalie Jim Craig and Soviet star Sergei Makarov spent a lot of their free time in Lake Placid at the athlete's village playing an arcade game (Centipede, I believe) against each other. They both saw it as a way to sharpen hand-eye coordination, and they were thrilled to find that they could play it free for hours on end without dropping quarters into it. LOL.