Hockey star Hilary Knight's road to Olympic gold included a whistle stop or two in Stamford with a "beer league."

 The winter Olympics cannot pass without my mentioning a microscopic Stamford link to the victorious U.S. women's ice hockey team.

U.S. women's team captain Hilary Knight played a couple of games about a decade ago in the north rink at Chelsea Piers athletic complex in our city’s Cove neighborhood. Her road to Olympic gold culminated  Thursday (Feb. 19) when the Americans defeated Canada 2-1 in overtime of the final game of the women's hockey tournament before a worldwide audience in Milan Cortina, Italy. Ms. Knight scored the goal that sent the game into overtime.

Hilary performed on a smaller stage before she ascended to the apex of women's hockey. A couple of hundred fans and I saw Ms. Knight and her Boston Pride play in December 2015 against the then-Stamford-based Connecticut Whale at Chelsea Piers. The teams were among the four founding members of the defunct National Women’s Hockey League, which claimed to be the first professional women’s hockey league in North America to pay its players. 

The Whale battled the Pride a couple of more times in 2016 at Chelsea Piers during the NWHL’s inaugural season. The financially troubled league folded in 2023 as the seven-team Premier Hockey Federation. Hilary called her now former employer a “glorified beer league” while some of her colleagues refused to play in the PHF and demanded a new, fiscally solid league. 

They got what they asked for. About three years ago, the Professional Women’s Hockey League swallowed the Pride, the Whale and the rest of the PHF by purchasing the league and its intellectual properties, thereby sinking it. My beloved Whale and the  pod squad, cetacean generation and beluga brigade puns that the team mascot spawned now lie in the Davy Jones locker of hockey obscurity. The PWHL, meanwhile, has grown from six teams in its first season (2024-25) to eight in Canada and the United States in 2025-26.

In addition to the Olympic team, Hilary plays for the Seattle Torrent of the PWHL. The league’s New York Sirens played a couple of games in Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport and maintained a practice facility at Chelsea Piers in their first season. The Sirens currently play home games in Newark, N.J.

That’s all I’ve got for a local angle for this year’s winter Olympics. Sports writer Roger Cleaveland of the Waterbury Republican American had a bigger and better Connecticut connection to Ms. Knight. Mr. Cleaveland told us about Hilary playing girls hockey at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford. She scored 53 goals during her senior year in 2006-07. This will be the fifth and final Olympics for the 36-year-old Ms. Knight, according to Roger’s Feb. 1 story in the Republican American, Stamford Advocate and other Hearst Connecticut newspapers. 

Here’s an epilogue. During the end-of-game handshake Thursday between the Americans and Canadians, some Canadian players could tell their fellow North Americans they don't want to become our 51st state, as President Trump has proposed. No, Canada! Annex your beautiful country to Greenland and Denmark instead.

What fun sports media would have every time they cover a college or professional event above the 49th parallel. “The Canadiens are trailing the Rangers 5-1 on their home ice, Marv. Something is rotten in the state Denmark.”

                                      —  Let me quit while I’m ahead —

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