They were left with the sadness and the what ifs, with the yearning to have written an alternate ending to the one they faced as the clock turned from Thursday to Friday.
“I feel like we just — of course deserved a different result,” Tkachuk said. “I think everybody in this room gave 100 percent. Obviously, that’s really disappointing when you don’t get rewarded for sacrificing your body for the guy next to you.
“I think this year, this moment, can really motivate us going into next year. But I think the first emotion you come up [with] is disappointment, sadness, and I thought we deserved a different result.”
This tournament will do a tremendous amount for USA Hockey, whether in the kids it will inspire to take up the game, the fans it has won among groups that never considered hockey before, in the players who — as Larkin pointed out postgame — have not always embraced playing in the World Championships the way they might.
That much is clear.
But at some point, the U.S. has to win in the final, to take the crown from Canada, which it has not done since 1996, when the Tkachuk on the ice was Keith and not Brady or Matthew.
It was supposed to be this year, this tournament.
It wasn’t. Not this team. Not this time.
They had done, again, what they did in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, beating Canada in the round-robin, as they had Saturday in Montreal at Bell Centre, before falling when the medal was on the line.
Still, they were heartened.
“I think we left absolutely everything out there,” Brady Tkachuk said. “Just the sacrifice that we had for each other — I know it was a 10-day tournament, but it felt like we’d been playing together for this whole year. This is such a close group. This group is something special and I know we’re going to have a lot of success down the road.”
