Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. It’s the ultimate patch for a buggy product, a way to convince ourselves that things were better when the resolution was lower and the stakes felt higher. On February 22, 1980, a group of American college kids beat the Soviet Union on a sheet of ice in Lake Placid. We call it a miracle. In reality, it was a data anomaly that we’ve been trying to replicate with algorithms ever since.

History likes to polish the edges off these moments. We remember Al Michaels screaming about belief, but we forget the tech that delivered it. The game wasn't even live in most of the U.S. It was on tape delay. Imagine that today. If a game isn’t streamed in 4K with sub-second latency, the internet has a collective aneurysm. In 1980, you had to wait for the local news to tell you what happened three hours ago. There was a friction to information that gave it weight. Now, everything is instant, frictionless, and somehow feels lighter than air.

Hockey is a sport defined by its refusal to change, followed by a sudden, desperate lurch into the future. On this same day in 1965, Pat LaFontaine was born. He was a wizard on the ice, a reminder of a time when "player safety" was an oxymoron and helmets were optional suggestions. Fast forward to the modern NHL. Every player is a walking sensor. We have "NHL Edge" data tracking puck speed, skating distance, and burst frequency. We know exactly how much a player's heart rate spikes when they’re killing a penalty.

But does it make the game better? Or does it just turn athletes into nodes in a network?

The friction today isn't in the physics; it’s in the monetization. Watching a game on February 22 in 2024 requires a PhD in subscription management. You need a cable package, except when you need ESPN+, unless the game is on TNT, or if you’re unlucky enough to live in a "blackout zone" where a regional sports network holds your local team hostage for twenty bucks a month. The price tag for being a fan has shifted from a ticket and a beer to a recurring line item on your credit card statement that you’re too tired to cancel.

And then there’s the gambling. God, the gambling.

In 1980, the "Miracle" was about geopolitics and the Cold War. Today, it would be brought to you by DraftKings. The screen would be cluttered with live odds. We wouldn't be wondering if we believe in miracles; we’d be wondering if the over/under on the second period was going to hit. We’ve traded the mythic for the mathematical. We’ve optimized the soul out of the sport to ensure the house always gets its cut.

Other things happened on Feb. 22, of course. In 1979, the New York Rangers became the first team in NHL history to have four players score 30 goals in a season. It’s a nice stat. A clean bit of trivia. But in the age of sports analytics, that kind of balanced scoring is a coaching directive, not an organic byproduct of talent. We’ve solved the game. We’ve used spreadsheets to determine that a cross-slot pass has a 14% higher chance of resulting in a goal than a point shot. The players aren't playing anymore; they’re executing a script written by a guy in a windowless room with a degree from MIT.

We look back at the grainy 4:3 footage of Herb Brooks and his "amateurs" because it represents a version of reality that hadn't been processed by a GPU yet. It was messy. It was inefficient. It was human. Now, we have high-definition replays that can determine if a player’s skate was a millimeter off the ice three minutes before a goal was scored, leading to a ten-minute review that kills any momentum the game had left.

We’ve traded the thrill of the unknown for the precision of the video review. It’s a classic tech trade-off: we solved the "error" problem, but in doing so, we accidentally deleted the joy.

So, sure, celebrate the anniversary. Wear the jersey. Watch the documentaries. Just try not to think too hard about the fact that we’ve turned a game of ice and steel into a data entry exercise for a sportsbook's backend server.

Do you actually miss the hockey, or do you just miss the time when you didn't know the exact probability of everything that was about to happen?