by Laura Garber
Two minutes were all that was left. The U.S. women’s hockey team was still down 1-0 to archrival Canada, and it looked like that was how it was going to end, so stifling was the defense. But then Hilary Knight — 36 years old, playing on a torn MCL she’d told nobody about, in what she had already announced would be her final Olympics — tipped a shot from Laila Edwards past the Canadian goalie to tie the game, sending the Santagiulia Arena into bedlam.
Then came one of those moments that seem instantly etched beyond time and into Olympic lore. Four minutes into overtime, Team USA’s Taylor Heise gathered the puck behind her own goal, and as she skated out saw something improbable. Defenseman Megan Keller was 100 feet away, on the offensive side of the ice, almost alone. Keller had realized that the Canadians were executing an ill-timed line change and took the chance to sneak up the ice.
Heise threaded a pass the length of the ice to Keller, who found herself alone against a defender — a situation, as coach John Wroblewski would later note, that made no sense, and all the sense in the world. Keller knifed toward the goal, gave a quick deke to lose the defender, and shot the puck past the goalie for a historic golden goal.
A tumult of blue erupted on the ice as Team USA players swarmed each other in celebration, Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” pumping through the arena. On the bench, Wroblewski — who had spent four years quietly building the most dominant women’s hockey team the world had ever seen, all from his home in Hermosa Beach — stood stock-still. Tears rolled down his face.
“Watching their elation, their victory — it touches every part of you as a human being,” Wroblewski told reporters at the post-game press conference.
His players, lost in their celebration, didn’t notice at first. But they watched the replays later. Hayley Scamurra, appearing on USA Hockey coach and adviser Mike Bonelli’s “Our Kids Play Hockey” podcast, said it moved them deeply.
“You could just see the total emotional release, I think,” Scamurra said. “Because he was also holding it [in] for us…the confidence, and the calmness, at times. And to then have it come to fruition — to see that he cared that much meant a lot to me, and I know meant a lot to my teammates as well.”
Bonelli called it “one of the most raw and beautiful moments I think I’ve ever seen as a coach.”
The reaction was also just something deeply human — a coach who had spent thousands upon thousands of hours working to elevate his players, seeing all their dreams come true in one spectacularly unexpected flick of a wrist.
“The uniqueness of that goal will be a pleasant haunt for me,” Wroblewski said of Keller’s winner. “She should not have been out there one-on-one as a defenseman. It just really shouldn’t have happened. So for her to engage in a one-on-one in the middle of the ice like that, none of it made sense until you watch it. She was made for that moment. That was one of the most special goals you’ll ever see, for a variety of reasons.”
Throughout the tournament, Wroblewski had worn a vintage USA Hockey jacket he’d found on eBay — treasure hunting, he calls it — that had once belonged to Walter Bush, the former USA Hockey president who was instrumental in lobbying women’s hockey onto the Olympic stage in the first place. For Wroblewski, the jacket was more than a keepsake. It was a thread connecting the 1998 Nagano Games, where women’s hockey made its Olympic debut, to this moment in Milan, nearly three decades later — a journey he had given his life to, that had nearly slipped away from him entirely, now culminating in a single golden goal on a February night in Italy.
The entire night, as it already resides in Wroblewski’s memory, had an almost ethereal quality.
“I felt like I was in a Metallica concert back in 2003 with the energy,” he said of the atmosphere inside the arena. “It was almost like the doors were open because there was just this draft of energy coming along, and the crowd was so intense. We’d beaten Canada seven straight times. To beat a team eight times in a row, it’s unheard of.”
The 2026 win was Team USA’s third gold in women’s hockey — after Nagano in 1998 and Pyeongchang in 2018 — leaving them two behind Canada’s five. But the gap in the rivalry has never felt smaller.
Wroblewski has been a USA Hockey devotee since childhood, a kid who dreamed of wearing the uniform. He played at Notre Dame and in the minor leagues before turning to coaching, spending years developing elite young talent as head coach of the USA men’s Hockey National Team Development Program’s under-18 team. Some of those players went on to compete for the gold-medal winning U.S. men’s team in Milan.
He joined the Los Angeles Kings organization in 2020 to coach the American Hockey League’s Ontario Reign, bringing him to the South Bay, where he settled in Hermosa Beach alongside a community of current and former Kings players who have long made the beach cities home. Two years later, he and the organization parted ways, amicably.
“It became apparent that professional hockey, at the time, wasn’t going to work for me,” Wroblewski said. “I was considering getting out of hockey altogether.”
Then his phone rang. It was the summer of 2022, just before the International Ice Hockey Federation Women’s World Championships. USA Hockey needed a new head coach for the women’s national team.
“It came around at a time where it was like a life preserver getting thrown your way,” he said.
The fit was immediate. He could remain in Hermosa, parachuting in for events and tournaments, while running a program he believed in deeply.
“I get to live here and run an Olympic program,” he said. “It’s kind of incredible.”
Wroblewski’s reputation is as a developer of talent — someone who can walk into a rink and instinctively identify who has that special gift, and who does not.
“It’s just like somebody who studies art walks into a studio — they know instantly who’s the prodigy and who did paint-by-number,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you how, but I can walk into a rink and pick out a hockey player.”
Under his direction, the national women’s team won gold at both the 2023 and 2025 World Championships, making him the first coach in USA Hockey history to lead both men’s and women’s national teams to gold.
What he found coaching elite women, he said, wasn’t so different from coaching elite men; they both share a desire to get better. Yet, there is one notable exception.
“One of the biggest differences is that the women carry absolutely zero ego,” he said. “In fact, if anything, I found that we could actually present ego to them.”
The arrival of the Professional Women’s Hockey League — launched in 2024 by LA Dodgers owner Mark Walter and his wife Kimbra — had transformed the talent pipeline. For the first time, women were getting real professional game reps with high-level coaching, and it showed.
“The skating, shooting, hockey IQ — it’s all been elevated by the introduction of the pro league,” Wroblewski said. “They’re getting real game reps with coaching at the professional level, which they’ve never gotten before.”
The journey toward Milan began in earnest at an orientation camp in Lake Placid in August 2025. When Wroblewski arrived, he knew immediately something was different. Training sessions planned for 45 minutes stretched to 90. Video sessions ran long because the players demanded more.
“That was not a coaching mandate,” he said. “That was just reading the room and the intensity level.”
He wouldn’t say it out loud at the time, but he filed it away.
“Their intensity level back in August was already Olympic medal level,” he said. “You walked in and you’re like, ‘okay, it’s different.’ It was just different that year. You read the room and you matched it.”
Central to the roster Wroblewski assembled was a commitment to Hilary Knight’s legacy. The team’s captain had been the face of American women’s hockey for more than a decade, and Wroblewski built the team around giving her — and the program — the sendoff they deserved.
“One of the big goals of this Olympics was to preserve Hilary’s legacy,” he said. “How do you surround this player with the right ingredients to cement her legacy? The only way to do that was with the gold medal.”
The roster wasn’t finalized until mid-December, with multiple players competing for a handful of remaining spots. For the women involved, the stakes extended well beyond Olympic glory — a roster spot meant a professional contract, and the difference between financial security and scrambling to make ends meet.
“You go from being able to live in a place like Hermosa, to needing an extra job territory,” Wroblewski said of players who don’t make the cut. “The contractual value of each one of these selection spots — that’s a job that we take very, very seriously.”
He leaned heavily into youth, with nine or 10 of his Olympians still in college, compared to zero on Canada’s roster, whose average age was 30.
“Women versus girls, watch out,” he said of the gold medal matchup. “That perseverance was absolutely amazing to me — that our team spirit could gut one out from them in the 58th minute. That’s the true testament of this team. Until that puck was in the back of the net on Megan Keller’s goal, that game was a coin flip.”
Throughout the tournament, Team USA posted five consecutive shutouts — an Olympic record — though Wroblewski said he barely noticed at the time.
“You’re just so encapsulated with momentum as a coach,” he said. “It’s like the universe speaking to you when you’re getting shutouts. I look at a shutout as an individual type of award for the goalies. I just think it shows genuine connectivity with your team.”
When the gold medal game reached its final two minutes with his team still trailing, Wroblewski pulled goalie Aerin Frankel for an extra attacker — a calculated gamble honed during his time with the Ontario Reign.
“You remove emotion from a decision like that, you completely remove emotion,” he said. “It becomes a poker game.”
He has spoken publicly about coaches not being given Olympic gold medals, and is unambiguous about whether it should be that way. It’s proper, he says, that the medals belong to the athletes alone.
“You’re in service mode as the coach. Your energy is solely on providing the platform for the players to succeed. But the people in the room are the ones who ultimately create that spirit and that aura.”
The team found its own way to honor him. At a dinner after the Games, the players presented Wroblewski with the Order of Ikkos medal — an award that allows Olympic medalists to recognize a coach or mentor instrumental to their success.
“For them to have that mutual admiration, it touched me,” he said.
Back home in Hermosa, the celebrations took on a more familiar character. On February 28, Wroblewski threw the ceremonial first pitch at the 75th Hermosa Beach Little League opening day, delivering it to Police Chief Landon Phillips.
The team has been invited to join Flavor Flav — the rapper and outspoken women’s sports supporter — for a party in Las Vegas.
“Oh, if I’m in, I’ll be over there for sure,” Wroblewski said.
The women’s team also declined an invitation to the White House — a scheduling conflict, Wroblewski confirmed, not a political statement — while working to find a date that works.
But the parties will end, and when they do, the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps will be waiting. Wroblewski is already thinking about it.
“Because that’s all anybody will talk about if they don’t get it done in four years — ‘it’s a super talented group, but they didn’t get it done back to back,'” he said. “Because Canada’s gonna be super hungry.”
For now, though, he lets himself sit with what this team was, something he thinks of less in terms of the gold medal than in pure admiration for who the women are behind the hockey masks.
“They’re genuinely inspiring,” he said. ” Not only to the people around them, but to themselves. There was zero complacency. Yet there was no panic in any of these women to achieve what they wanted and what they were born to be. I think one of the proudest moments I had in this process was selecting the human beings. The athletes, their capabilities are one thing, but there’s a lot of really good hockey players. I thought that the human beings surfaced in every one of our players.” ER
