Heavenly Touch Sarah Tueting’s Stonewalling Of Canada Drapes Gold Medals On The Necks Of U.S. Women
With an angel on her shoulder and her team behind her, Sarah Tueting was almost untouchable in goal.
Ask the Canadians.
Whether it was doing a split in the crease, reaching far left with her glove to snare the puck or fearlessly absorbing a slap shot into her pads, Tueting did it all Tuesday. Thanks to her 21-save effort, the United States won the first Olympic women’s hockey tournament with a 3-1 victory over Canada.
U.S. coach Ben Smith wouldn’t reveal his starting goalie in the days leading up to the game, saying Tueting and Sara DeCosta were virtually interchangeable. When Tueting got the call, DeCosta passed along her lucky charm - a tiny gold pin with an angel holding a hockey stick.
Tueting said DeCosta had worn the pin “on her equipment, on her padding, since she made the team in August.”
“So before the game, after warmups, she said, ‘All right, I’m passing this on to you.”’
Tueting wore it on the back of her upper right arm. At the postgame party, she lifted the brim of a huge red, white and blue Dr. Seuss hat to show the pin stuck to her team baseball cap underneath.
“After the game, I tried to give it back to her and she wouldn’t take it back,” she said.
Tueting, a 21-year-old from Winnetka, Ill., is known as “Teeter” by her teammates.
The nickname came from her days at Dartmouth, where she was one of six women on the freshman team who answered to the name of Sarah. Put it this way: Teeter is better than Hound, Devil or Lenny, the nickname that three of the other Sarahs assumed.
She insists she isn’t better than the only other Sara she plays with these days. Teammates and Smith have said they have equal confidence in the goalies, and the goalies, in turn, have become each other’s confidantes, boosters and de facto coaches.
“In terms of goalie relationships, they can get from extremely volatile to just mildly aggressive,” Tueting said with a laugh at a postgame party.
“We haven’t had any of that. When we first made the team, I remember hugging her and saying, ‘We’re going to win this gold. We are going to backstop this team to the gold medal.”’
Smith regularly alternated the two in pre-Olympic games and even through the preliminary round, when they ended up with almost identical minutes played. He even toyed with the notion - very briefly - of playing each for half of the goldmedal game.
Tueting didn’t teeter Tuesday night - particularly in the third period.
With 17 minutes left, she knocked away a shot by Canada’s Danielle Goyette. Two minutes later, she forced an approaching Canadian to go to the backhand, and the puck slid harmlessly through the crease.
Canada finally broke through with 4:01 left, scoring a power-play goal to close to 2-1. Minutes later, Tueting kicked away the potential game-tying shot.
And not long after that, the U.S. team added an empty-net goal with 8 seconds left. When the buzzer sounded, Tueting leaped into the air and kicked up her padded legs in a little celebratory dance.
Quickly, she was smothered by her teammates, many of whom had long experienced the agony of finishing second to the Canadians in the Women’s World Championships.
Tueting outplayed her Canadian counterpart, Manon Rheaume, who came in with a 0.81 goals-against average.
“Canada’s always had the edge … but throughout the tournament we gained confidence,” DeCosta said. “We played them so many times, got to know them so well, we knew we could beat them.”
When forward Karyn Bye led the parade out of the locker room for the medal ceremony, the team lined up on either side of their goalie - a fitting tribute to a Tueting who didn’t teeter.