MILAN — Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” painting is housed in this city, at the former Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. That’s a few kilometers from the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, where Thursday night the United States and Canada’s women’s teams produced a masterpiece of an Olympic gold medal game.
Applying bold brush strokes with her hockey stick, American Megan Keller ended it with “The Last Shot.”
Keller’s sudden-death, golden goal was a work of art, an extemporaneous display of skill and daring that was the only fitting way to end this overtime epic. Taking a brilliant, half-rink outlet pass from Taylor Heise, Keller began attacking at the Canadian blue line from the left wing—in the three-on-three overtime format, there was plenty of open ice in which to operate. She maximized the chance with a fancy maneuver young hockey players will be trying to mimic for years to come.
With Canadian defender Claire Thompson trying to close the distance between them, Keller took the puck wider left, outside her body, inviting Thompson to lunge forward for a pokecheck. Then the Boston College product essentially broke Thompson’s ankles—she slid the puck past her, cut sharply to the center of the ice and got it back on her stick in front of Canadian goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens.
Here, at last, was a clean look at the goal the Canadians had defended so tenaciously all night. Keller backhanded the puck between Desbiens's legs. It dribbled into the net, and the U.S. won a classic battle of the game’s two super powers, 2–1.
Keller was acting in the moment, creating something on the fly. She was going for it.
“We talked about it going into overtime—not playing not to lose, playing to win,” Keller said. “I think a lot of times you get a little nervous trying to make a move. I thought, ‘Why not? Let’s take a chance here and try to get to the net.’ ”
Keller said she has tried that maneuver “maybe in practice, I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking or planning anything. Just taking what was given.”
Megan Keller's goal SEALED THE DEAL for the gold! 🤩 pic.twitter.com/guXeBiDhZE
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) February 19, 2026
In point of fact, this was a game the juggernaut American team had to take. The proud Canadians, in a rare underdog role, refused to give it away.
For nearly 58 minutes Thursday night, a star-spangled nightmare was unfolding for the U.S. women. A prolific scoring machine had stalled. An impenetrable defense had been pierced—just once, but that looked like it would be the difference between gold and silver. A team that had never trailed for a minute of this Olympic tournament found itself behind for a prolonged period of time.
We had seen individual athletes succumb to the withering pressure of the Olympics many times over the last two weeks. Now we were watching an entire team buckling.
The Americans romped to six straight victories in this tournament prior to the gold medal game, with a 31–1 goal differential that included five straight shutouts. That included a 5–0 shellacking of Canada last week that seemed to not just suggest a changing of the guard, but to shout it. The younger, faster American team was coming for the crown that their neighbors to the north have usually worn.
If you stripped away history and just looked at the current iterations of these two teams, the rematch figured to be another beatdown. But hockey is Canada’s game, and heading into this matchup its women’s team had won five of the seven gold medals since it became an Olympic sport. The U.S. had captured the other two, so this meeting was business as usual.
The first period quickly established that the beatdown of pool play would not be repeated. Canada got better scoring chances, while also packing in doggedly on the defensive end in support of Desbiens. The score after one was 0–0, the first time in this tournament that the Americans weren’t leading heading into intermission.
The second period turned a battle into a crisis for the U.S. Canada put a short-handed goal on the board 54 seconds into the period, then withstood increased offensive pressure from the Americans. The Canadians threw everything they had in front of the U.S.’s offensive thrusts—bodies, sticks and Desbiens. On the few occasions when the Americans got a good look at the net, they misfired or couldn’t get a stick down.
The burden kept increasing on the shoulders of the favorites.
“We wanted to play in-their-face, relentless hockey, and we did,” said Canadian star Marie-Philip Poulin. “I was really proud of how we showed up tonight.”
Canada was just a little more than two minutes away from walking out with an all-time program win, a final act of defiance from an aging roster (Canada had a roster full of PWHL pros, while Team USA brought seven college players to the Olympics). But the U.S. kept coming, with brilliant goalie Aerin Frankel keeping her team in the game. Finally, the Canadian defensive wall cracked.
American defender Laila Edwards wound up with the puck out front, with time and space to wind up and fire a rocket. Seeing her in position, U.S. captain Hilary Knight—the team’s heartbeat—hustled herself into position in the crease.
“I better get set up,” Knight said she thought to herself in that moment. “She’s going to rip that puck, and either I get a piece of it or it’s going to go right in.”
Knight’s stick got a piece of the shot, deflecting it perfectly into the net—the last goal of her accomplished career, with retirement from the international game now at hand. Very nearly out of time, the American women found a way to make a play with just two minutes left in regulation. What looked like a devastating loss became a rejuvenating tie and an overtime pressure cooker.
But simply getting the game into OT shifted the burden. Canada had played a near-perfect game, had an epic upset within reach, and then had to regroup. The U.S. had renewed confidence.
Knight’s message to her teammates at that point: “We’re going to win the game. It’s that simple.”
They did, on the dazzler from Keller. The emotional eruption thereafter was a classic hockey scene—sticks and gloves flying everywhere, players hurtling over the bench, everyone enveloping Keller in a massive, blue-jerseyed group hug.
The Canadian reaction was stark and painful. Heads dropped and bodies bent over double, and stayed that way.
One of the cruel elements of Olympic pomp is that the losing team must spend a small eternity on the ice waiting for the medal ceremony. Twenty-five minutes passed, as preparations were made and the U.S. team kept rejoicing. The Canadians stood silent and still—nobody moving, nobody smiling, misery personified. Thompson, the defender beaten for the golden goal, folded her arms tightly across her body for a very long time.
When they handed out the medals, the Canadians glumly accepted them. This was one of the saddest collections of silver medalists ever seen.
They put everything they had into this hockey work of art. But the final brush strokes belonged to the United States and Megan Keller, and “The Last Shot” will be remembered as her masterpiece.
More Winter Olympics on Sports Illustrated
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- Gold Hair, Gold Dress, Gold Medal: Alysa Liu Radiates Joy As Olympic Champion
- Alysa Liu Shared Classy Moment With Ami Nakai, Amber Glenn After Winning Olympic Gold
- Kenny Albert Had Iconic Call of Megan Keller’s Gold Medal-Winning Goal for Team USA
- Megan Keller’s Gold-Medal Winning Goal Left Team USA Ice Hockey Coach in Tears
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Megan Keller’s Masterful Goal Makes the U.S. Queens of Hockey Once Again .
