After Team USA won the Miracle on Ice game over the USSR in the 1980 Olympics, they celebrated with then-Vice President Walter Mondale in the locker room, and took a congratulatory phone call from President Jimmy Carter, who told coach Herb Brooks that “we were watching the TV with one eye, and Iran and the economy with the other.” Carter invited the team over to the White House “for Cokes.” Brooks couldn’t celebrate just yet: That team, after all, still had a Gold Medal game to play. They eventually made it to the White House, not that it helped Carter any.

After Team USA won its thrilling gold medal game over Canada on Sunday, they celebrated with … FBI Director Kash Patel. Before you consider that another sign of American values eroding, remember that the 1980 Team USA visited the Oval Office just last December, and even gave President Trump a hat. Though, to be fair: They didn’t give Patel one.

Patel’s presence — and his chugging of a beer in the locker room no less — may have taken the shine off Team USA’s victory for some people, particularly those who might have been a little uncomfortable with all the go-USA patriotism on display in the first place. And yeah: I get it. It’s a weird time. But regardless, it is indisputably awesome that the United States won gold on Sunday, and it should make you feel happy, even if it also made Kash Patel happy, something that, we can all agree, should never happen.  Here are five  things about the gold-medal game to make you forget all about that locker-room scene.

1. We were actually underdogs.One of the biggest lies Americans tell themselves is that they are underdogs, ever, in anything. The best example of this came in the famous 1992 Dream Team Olympics, when Clyde Drexler, seconds after winning the Gold Medal while playing for what’s universally recognized as the most incredible accumulation of talent in sports history (John Stockton was the 12th man on that team!), told a reporter that the win was particularly special because “no one believed in us” despite multiple instances in which USA opponents asked for autographs during the game. We’re always the favorites. We’re always the empire the rest of the world is trying to take down.

Men’s hockey is a rare exception to this rule. (Another is men’s soccer, which we’ll re-discover at the World Cup this summer.) The United States hasn’t won a gold medal in men’s hockey at the Olympics since that 1980 team and had in fact won only........

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