Face-off at the summit

s minor edge rubs and wear with a few closed short tears.. The Canadians and the NHL were full of themselves before the series started. The Russians were unknowns, victors ad nauseum over Olympians from Sweden, Finland, Czechoslovakia, et al., but untested against NHL competition. Cocksure predictions of an 8-game sweep were not only the norm in Canada, but a national right (and rite). When the Canadians scored the first two goals of the series almost before the first puck dropped, all seemed right in Saskatchewan. But after that came debacle: Canada lost the game, 7-3, and therein lies Ken Dryden's tale. Dryden was one of the top NHL goalies of the 1970s. He led the Montreal Canadiens to six Stanley Cups, won Rookie of the Year in 1972, and earned five Vezina Trophies as the best goalie in an NHL season. That he started four of the eight games against the Russians came as no surprise. The shock was that a star of Dryden's magnitude was forced to change his entire goaltending style after losing his first two starts. Nor was he alone. His teammates were just as unprepared for a style of hockey they had never seen before. (I still recall the baffled expressions of the Canadian TV hockey "experts" after one of the losses.).. Today's hockey fans know a lot of National Hockey League players whose names end in "ov"--Afinogenov, Kozlov, Federov, Antropov, Chistov, Samsonov, etc. Most are Russian. Forty years ago, such a statement would be unheard of. The Cold War was on, and while Canadians and Russians played the same game, they did so in two hostile worlds. Their only hockey contact occurred in the Olympic Games when the Soviets played Canadian amateurs, not professionals from the NHL..Until this landmark beginning!