Hlushko'90, Mayer'84 and Norris'88 Reflect on Olympic Gold Medal Heartbreak

Some 24 years later, Todd Hlushko still remembers the euphoric feeling of being seconds away from jumping over the boards to celebrate Olympic hockey gold.

And then, crushing disappointment.

Not expected to do much at the 1994 Games with a roster made up of mostly amateur players, the winger and his overachieving teammates battled Sweden to a 2-2 tie through regulation and 10 minutes of overtime in a tense and stress-filled final.

After each country connected twice in the shootout, Petr Nedved – the slick Czech-born centre who had become a Canadian citizen before the tournament – had the game on his stick in the sixth round with a chance at glory in Lillehammer, Norway.

"'I'm going to be going nuts as soon as he scores,'" Hlushko remembers thinking. "All the emotions that are inside you, it's like a toilet seat – up and down, up and down.

"Nedved dekes (Swedish goalie) Tommy Salo out of his jock strap and goes to his backhand and the puck rolls off the tip of his blade and goes wide. All I see is open net and I think he's going to score.

"When it goes wide your elation just gets deflated."

Most Canadian hockey fans know how the script played out from there.

A baby-faced Peter Forsberg, not yet the NHL superstar he would become, stepped up in the shootout's seventh round and beat Corey Hirsch on an iconic one-handed move that's been replayed thousands of times, and even wound up featured on a Swedish postage stamp.

"Almost got it with my glove," Hirsch said in a recent interview. "With Forsberg, great players, Hall of Famers, legends, they do things in the moment that you wouldn't expect.

"That's what Peter Forsberg did."

Salo then sealed the win by stopping Paul Kariya on the final attempt to send the stunned Canadians home with silver, their hopes of winning the country's first Olympic hockey gold in 42 years crushed.

"I felt awful for our guys," said Tom Renney, the team's head coach. "We'd accomplished much more than anybody expected, but that wasn't good enough.

"We wanted the gold."

The NHL would begin its Olympic participation four years later to start a run of five consecutive tournaments, with Canada winning gold medals in 2002, 2010 and 2014.

While fans were left disappointed when the league declined to take part in the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, members of the last Canadian team not to feature in the "best-on-best" format said that, despite the bitter conclusion, their journey to the 1994 gold-medal game stands as a career highlight.

And they expect it to be the same for this crop of players, many of them former NHLers currently playing in Europe.

"The tournament was surreal," said forward Dwayne Norris, who was stopped in the third round of the 1994 shootout. "It was probably the greatest team I ever played with in terms of guys with a common goal and purpose.

"It was an incredible run."

The majority of the squad had been together for most of the year, criss-crossing Canada and Europe in preparation for Lillehammer. They finished second in their Olympic round-robin group before beating the Czech Republic in the quarter-finals and Finland in the semis to set up the showdown with the Swedes.

"The first couple shifts you're on pins and needles," Hlushko said of the gold-medal game. "You don't want to make any mistakes. As soon as the puck hits your stick you try to get rid of it as quick as you can.

"We knew that Sweden probably had a little bit more firepower than we did. The way that we had success in those Olympics was by defence first."

Canada fell behind 1-0 in the first period before Kariya – a 2017 Hockey Hall of Fame inductee – tied things midway through the third and Derek Mayer put the underdogs up 2-1.

But a late penalty opened the door for Sweden to equalize with under two minutes to go in regulation and send the game to overtime.

Canadian defenceman Adrian Aucoin, who would go on to play more than 1,100 games in the NHL, saw spot duty in 1994 as a 20-year-old, but still remembers the raw emotion of the moment.

"It felt like we were going to win," he said. "Them tying it up took a little wind out of our sails, but we still felt like we had the momentum going into overtime."

Following those 10 scoreless extra minutes, Nedved and Kariya buried Canada's first two attempts in the shootout.

"I'm like, 'Wow all we need is a couple saves or a couple goals and we're done,"' said Canadian forward Brian Savage, who also had a long NHL career. "It just didn't happen."

Magnus Svensson scored on Sweden's second shot, and Forsberg connected in the fourth round before completing his memorable deke in the seventh following Nedved's miss.

"It was like slow motion," Savage said of Forsberg's move. "It was amazing."

"I thought initially it might be an illegal goal," added Renney, now the CEO of Hockey Canada. "I thought he'd got ahead of the puck, and then I'd thought he'd stopped, but that was just a coach trying to figure out a way for it not to count.

"When it went in it was just brutal."

Salo followed that up by stopping Kariya to clinch gold for the Swedes, completing a string of five straight failed Canadian shootout attempts after going up 2-0.

"It was a crazy ride of emotions," said Hlushko. "It was something I'd never trade because it was a once-in-a-lifetime feeling.

"We were on the wrong end of the result, but I still have pretty cool and vivid memories to this day."