The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily is published in Salt Lake City and available in event venues and on newsstands for 16 straight days during the 2002 Winter Games. Here are some sights and scenes from today’s edition.

Two to Tangle

The two best teams in women's hockey, Canada and the United States, were destined to renew their heated rivalry in another fierce final

No way in San Jose, eh? DeCosta (1) stopped this shot by Campbell in a 4–1 U.S. victory last fall. David E. Klutho

By Kostya Kennedy

Karyn Bye has been playing for the U.S. women's hockey team for more than 10 years, a decade during which she and her teammates have grown accustomed to shellacking opposing national teams. At last April's world championships in Minnesota, for example, the U.S. beat Germany, China, Finland and Russia by a combined score of -- no misprint here -- 41-1. Games against Team Canada, which defeated the U.S. 3-2 in the final of that tournament, are another matter. Those matches are commonly decided by a single goal, quite often have a championship riding on them and, in Bye's words, "are always a war."

"We know we have to leave every piece of ourselves out on the ice," says Bye, who recently moved to defense after playing forward for nine years, "because the Canadians demand that with the way they play. When people ask us what's going on with our team, they don't say, 'Are you going to win?' They say, 'Are you going to beat Canada?'"

It was difficult to look at the semifinals (Canada-Finland and U.S.-Sweden) and see anything but a Canada-U.S. final. Since the first world championships, in 1990, the U.S. and Canada have faced each other in the final of every international tournament that they've both competed in. The U.S. has gone 9-21 against Canada in tournament play but has never lost a game to another country, including nontournament games. The teams have met 51 times (Canada leads the series 28-23), which is nearly three times more often than either squad has played anyone else. This familiarity has bred, in no particular order, mutual contempt, mutual respect, the highest caliber of women's hockey in history, heated debates about whether the women's game should legalize the body-slamming that every U.S.-Canada game is rife with anyway and the single fiercest rivalry of these Olympic Games.

"We're at the point where everything we go through in practice is basically in preparation to meet them," says Canada forward and captain Cassie Campbell. "The time may come when a team like Finland or Russia comes up and knocks one of us off, but right now it's us and them. In the back of your mind you're always thinking, What are they going to bring?"

Never did the U.S. women bring more to the ice than on Feb. 17, 1998, at Big Hat Arena in Nagano, when the team shut out Canada for the first 56 minutes of a 3-1 win. The victory clinched the first Olympic gold medal awarded in women's hockey. Bye led the team with five goals in the Games, and you may have seen images of her wrapped in an oversized Old Glory just moments after the historic win. The Canadians certainly saw her -- and they cringed. "It was awful watching them celebrate, seeing them with those gold medals," says Campbell. "Does that mean more than all the world championships? I don't know. It sure sticks out more in our minds."

For all the grandeur of Olympic success, the U.S. remains, by objective standards, the second-best team in the world. Of the seven world championships played in the past 12 years -- including the three since Nagano -- Canada has won every one, an achievement that some consider worth the weight of Olympic gold. "You can't get better than winning in the Olympics," says U.S. captain Cammi Granato, who has been with the team since its inception, "but each year you work all season for the world championships, and then each year they win. You end up just looking at each other in a daze, saying, 'When are we going to beat these guys?'"

"The way I see it," says U.S. coach Ben Smith, "is that we've both got what the other one wants. We're both trying to do whatever we can to be better than the other. It's almost like playing in a mirror, except you know that if you're not careful, your reflection will get ahead of you."

Rugged play -- exemplified by the clash of U.S. forward Tricia Dunn with Geraldine Heaney -- has marked the rivalry. David E. Klutho

In the early days of women's hockey there was no argument that Canada was the fairest team of them all. It trounced the U.S. in the finals of the 1990, '92 and '94 world championships and maintained a standard of skill and execution through the mid-'90s that the U.S. could only marvel at. When USA Hockey hired Smith as coach in 1996, the goal, he says, "was just to get to somewhere near Canada's level."

Still, the seeds of a rivalry had been sown. In 1994 Bye and Granato were attending graduate school and playing hockey, at Concordia University in Montreal. Shortly after the U.S. lost 6-3 to Canada at the world championships in Lake Placid, N.Y., that April, Bye and Granato drove back to school together. On the way they were harangued, half-seriously and at length, by the Canadian border patrol. "The guys there got on us pretty hard for losing in the worlds," says Granato. "In a way it felt good -- I mean, at least they knew who we were."

In 1997 the U.S. announced itself on a much larger scale. The steady improvement of women's college hockey programs, in tandem with Smith's tireless recruiting, had yielded the best, deepest U.S. team to date. At the worlds that April, before a hostile crowd in Kitchener, Ont., the U.S. took Canada to overtime before losing 4-3. Smith says the near victory inspired a resolve in his players, a sense of belief and a dedication to off-ice training that prepared the team for a series of games that ratcheted this feud to Hatfield-McCoy proportions. To drum up fan awareness, the U.S. and Canada played each other 13 times in the 31Ú2 months leading up to Nagano. Canada won seven games, the U.S. six. "We played them too many times," says Canada forward Vicky Sunohara. "They learned from us and got better and better."

And the games got rougher and rougher. Players on both teams regularly tested, and often ignored, the prohibition against bodychecking in the women's game. During a late-January matchup Granato and Canada forward Hayley Wickenheiser got in a sticks-high collision that left Granato with a gash in her upper lip. Wickenheiser also collided with Bye, and near the end of the match U.S. defenseman Angela Ruggiero -- who is nicknamed Rugger partly because she likes a good scrum -- dropped her gloves and squared off against Wickenheiser. No one there had ever seen a fight in a women's hockey game. Stunned referees immediately intervened.

The teams were still seething a few weeks later when they faced off in the final game of the double-elimination preliminary round in Nagano. Because both clubs were 4-0 and guaranteed to advance, many in the media made the mistake of labeling the round-robin finale as meaningless. "There's no such thing as a meaningless game between these teams," says U.S. goalie Sara DeCosta. "I don't care if it's a three-on-three shinny."

In the most memorable nonchampionship game in the history of the rivalry, the U.S. trailed Canada 4-1 with 12:55 remaining in the third period before scoring four times in less than six minutes and pulling away to a 7-4 victory. But the game will be remembered for more than that magnificent flurry. The U.S. took 28 penalty minutes in the game; Canada took 14. Ruggiero received a 10-minute misconduct for crushing forward Jayna Hefford against the boards. "They weren't just trying to intimidate us, they were trying to injure us," Hefford later complained.

The high sticks and high tempers didn't end with the final horn. Just before the postgame handshake U.S. forward Sandra Whyte shouted at Canada's Danielle Goyette, who had leveled U.S. defenseman Colleen Coyne in the second period and whose father had recently died. Goyette ran crying into the dressing room, and Canada coach Shannon Miller later charged that Whyte had "made a comment about [Goyette's] father's death and then laughed." Whyte denied referring to Goyette's father but admitted, "I said something I regret."

The helter-skelter game created an intense atmosphere when the teams faced off for the gold three days later. Olympians Patrick Roy and Eric Lindros spoke to Canada's women's team and urged them not to retaliate. They didn't. In the end Canada went quietly and the U.S. took home the gold. "I can't say we quite hate them," says Granato, "but it's like this: If an elevator full of them stops at your floor, you take the next one."

A FEW WEEKS after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, a package addressed to the U.S. women's hockey team arrived at its training facility in Lake Placid. The package contained a brown, spiral-bound notebook from Team Canada. Inside, each member of the Canadian team had written something to the U.S. players, expressing solidarity, empathy and, in some cases, comfort for U.S. forward Kathleen Kauth, whose father, Donald, was killed in the World Trade Center collapse. (Kauth was dropped from the team in December, in a pre-Games cut.) "We're not talking a sentence or two," says Bye. "We're talking three or four pages that some of them wrote. You get emotional seeing something like that."

In late October, when the teams played in Salt Lake City and San Jose, Team Canada's uniforms bore patches depicting the U.S. flag at half-staff. Campbell and DeCosta came together to do a promotional spot for women's hockey. "In a sense we're on the same team," says Campbell. "We're all trying to grow the game, to get some attention and get younger girls wanting to play. We need each other to do that. Up here, nothing gets people more excited than when we play the U.S."

The reverse is also true. "The games against Canada get the adrenaline flowing," says Granato. "In a sense it doesn't matter who we play for the gold medal, but I have to admit that whenever I let myself visualize us winning that final game, I always see Canada on the other side of the ice."