1980 U.S. Olympic 'Miracle' Hits Theaters

Feb. 6 -- Could anything ever again be as sweet as beating the Soviet Union at its own game? Yes, but it would require al Qaeda to form an Olympic team — and actually be good at something.

The amazing victory of the U.S. Olympic hockey team at Lake Placid still reverberates, long after the Soviet bloc crumbled.

To be sure, the Cold War didn't end in 1980 with a hockey game. But when a ragtag squad of U.S. college kids beat the best hockey team on Earth, it gave America something to believe in when the country's spirit was all but shot.

"Can you imagine American athletes playing Middle East terrorists in a sport — any sport? That's what it was like playing the Russians," says Jim Craig, the goalie of the U.S. team, speaking to a group of elementary school children too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall.

‘Do You Believe in Miracles? Yes!’

Craig and his teammates returned to Lake Placid on Thursday for a special screening of Miracle, a film, opening nationwide today, that recaptures the excitement of one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history.

Kurt Russell stars as "tough love" hockey coach Herb Brooks, who built the amateur team that went on to beat the same Soviet squad that had routinely humiliated NHL All-Stars.

America was resigned to defeat, and it was not just because of the Soviet tradition for excellence on ice. It was more of a national mood. Iranian revolutionaries overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage in a yearlong standoff. Soviet tanks had rolled into Afghanistan.

America's role as a world leader was in question. For the first time ever, the economy suffered high gas shortages, unemployment and skyrocketing inflation, giving birth to the buzzword "stagflation."

Out of nowhere, Brooks, the unorthodox hockey coach, gave America what has always fueled the imagination — a success story, a come-from-behind victory of the little guy.