BEIJING — When the puck drops here Tuesday afternoon on the latest edition of the Winter Olympics’ fiercest rivalry, former United States captain Meghan Duggan will be parked behind a computer at her Connecticut home, cheering on the women’s hockey team alongside fellow alumni at a virtual watch party that she helped put together. Her wife will not be invited.
“We’ve talked about it,” Duggan says. “It’s going to be separate rooms, separate TVs, I think.”
Even in the wider sports world, few matchups contain the raw passion and tension that is conjured every quadrennial when the U.S. and Canada face off. Consider: The two sides have met in all but one of six Olympic women’s hockey finals since the sport was introduced in 1998; no other nation has captured gold. The 2014 final in Sochi went to overtime. The ’18 final in PyeongChang required a shootout. And that is without mentioning the semi-annual IIHF world championships, where their average per-game goal differential over the past decade is a mere 1.6. “It’s heated,” three-time Olympic champion Gillian Apps says. “It’s amazing.”
For Duggan and Apps, though, this rivalry is far more complex than the ordinarily black-and-white calculus of this border battle. And they aren’t alone. In addition to them, two other married pairs of ex-American and Canadian players—Julie Chu and Caroline Ouellette and Kathleen Kauth and Jayna Hefford—have bridged the divide to build lives and families together away from the rink, proving once and for all that love is thicker than ice and vulcanized rubber.
“It’s not something that I would necessarily recommend for people to compete for an Olympic gold medal against the person that you’re dating,” Apps says. “But I think it says a lot for us to respect each other enough to know that we can handle something…