It happened 22 years ago, yet it seems as if it happened ...

	Jim Craig clutching the U.S. flag and looking for his father in the stands remains an indelible image.

Uh, 22 years ago.

Jim Craig, his mask off and his face and his hair damp with sweat, wore the American flag around his shoulders and looked up at the stands in the Lake Placid Olympic rink.

"Where's my father?" the Americans' 22-year-old goaltender asked, squinting.

The Soviets were in Afghanistan then, and Americans were being held hostage in Tehran -- a 444-day captivity that wouldn't end for 52 Americans until early 1981.

That had something to do with the U.S. reaction to the Americans' 4-3 victory over the Soviets at Lake Placid on February 22, 1980, of course. As the years have passed, as hair -- including Jim Craig's -- has gotten shorter or thinned, that element justifiably has slipped into the background. Yet the magnitude of the athletic accomplishment remains as monumental as ever.

It never really was an ideological crusade. This wasn't a case of bunch of American kids on skates responding to Nikita Khruschev banging his shoe. The hockey world of today underscores the fact that many of those men in red uniforms were wearing CCCP without having a fervent belief in the righteousness of the Politburo, or even a faith in the Soviet system itself.

	ESPN Classic Special Presentation Miracle on Ice
	On Thursday, Feb. 7 at 9 p.m. ET, ESPN Classic will air Team USA's memorable upset victory over the USSR in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.

When the 1980 U.S. team takes to the ice again Friday afternoon in a reunion game against a squad of NHL alumni, it will come in conjunction with the NHL All-Star Game weekend in Los Angeles -- a weekend that will showcase that changing hockey world.

"Allstate's given us a wonderful opportunity to get our team back together and let our kids and wives all got together," Craig was saying the other day, deftly slipping in the plug for the game's sponsor. "It's important to us. Twenty-two years is a long time."

Many of the 1980 Olympians have gotten together before on the ice, including in a 1995 meeting with a group of Boston Bruin alumni at Northeastern University. The reunion game won't even be in the Staples Center, but at the Center Ice Rink at the NHL FANtasy in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

"I'm in the shape of a 44-year-old man," Craig said. "I haven't really skated in about 15 years. But that's not what it's all about. It's about letting the fans chant U-S-A and get back to everything."

These guys, after all, are skating time markers. It can be a little reminiscent of following around Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, when he played in the pro-am of a golf tournament. That day, it was interesting just to listen, to hear a gallery full of memories of where this sampling of Americans were on July 20, 1969, or when Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind. It is like that with these hockey players, too. It was one time a tape-delayed broadcast added to -- instead of spoiled -- both the drama and the audience.

We knew it happened, but we had to see it to believe it.

The fans watching the 1980 Olympians in Los Angeles, or on television this weekend, just have to stay tuned to be reminded of how hockey has undergone what sometimes seems to be a century of revolution in 22 years -- as part of the world around it. There is no other sport in which the changes of geopolitics are so apparent.

On Saturday, Russians and a Latvian and even a Ukranian will be in the NHL All-Star game, and they are the successors -- so to speak -- of the men for whom Lake Placid was the virtually unfathomable, unbelievable disappointment. And then less than two weeks later, the world's six hockey powers will begin Olympic play at Salt Lake City, with virtually all the players on those elite teams coming from NHL rosters. There is no more Soviet Union in the Olympic hockey field, but a Latvia and a Belarus and a Slovakia and a breathing-free Czech Republic.

Al Michaels asked if we believed in miracles.

The Soviet players asked if this could really be happening. To them, it was that aberrational, stink-it-up night where nothing went right; but it also was a clinker in the clutch. And to the young and indefatigable Americans, it was a triumph of spirit, of perseverance -- remember, they had been whipped by the Soviets in New York not long before -- in 60 minutes of magic. That's not magic as in sleight of hand or trickery; it is magic, as in they made it happen and we still don't quite know how the hell they did it.

Jim Craig made 36 saves and Mike Eruzione, the lunchbucket winger who had played with Craig at BU, got the winning goal. That's how they did it, if you look at the summary.

But how did they pull it off?

Now we have come to understand that the Soviets were hockey players, too, with dreams and hopes and families. They had Slava Fetisov, a defenseman destined to be on a Stanley Cup champion and make the Hockey Hall of Fame and stand behind an NHL bench as an assistant coach. They had goalie Vladislav Tretiak, who became an NHL goaltending consultant who would shrug good-naturedly whenever someone would ask about being pulled during the Americans' upset victory. They had Sergei Makarov, who displayed a sliver of his greatness by the time he was able to play in the NHL.

And without going through the list, the bottom line is that savvy North American hockey fans always understood that it really came down to this:

A team of the United States' best prospects, many of destined for solid (or better) NHL careers, beat what was then the best team in the world. It was the Soviets' all-star team, although so many of them played for the Central Red Army in league play, and the national team played so many games together, there was no excuse for a lack of cohesiveness -- and they almost never needed to resort to excuses, anyway.

They were not a bunch of robots, not a bunch of bogeymen, but a bunch of men who in most cases were born too soon to be able to parlay their talents into once unimaginable wealth, and show their talents on a game-by-game basis among the other best players in the world.

It wasn't a miracle, but it was pretty damn close.

"I think the accomplishment kind of speaks for itself," Craig said. "The fact that we were amateurs playing against professionals gives you the idea that if you're all of one mind and have a singular goal, and have some great coaching and individual play, anything can happen."

Only a few days after Craig and the Americans secured the gold medal with a victory over Finland -- which had an obscure fourth-line winger named Jari Kurri -- the sudden national hero made his NHL bow with the Atlanta Flames. It was an electric night in the Omni, with fans waving small American flags as Craig and the Flames beat the Colorado Rockies. "That was a cool night!" Craig said.

But there were few highlights after that. The Flames moved to Calgary, Craig's rights were traded to the Bruins and he struggled both on and off the ice. He was charged with vehicular homicide, but was acquitted in 1982. The Bruins released him and he spent a season with the U.S. national team before joining the Minnesota North Stars, then retiring in 1984.

"I did the best I could," he said. "When it ended, I was able to know that I could play in the NHL and I chose to go to a different venue and I never looked back."

He played a not-so-grand total of 30 NHL games, but he met his wife, Sharlene, while he was with the North Stars' Central League affiliate, the Salt Lake City Golden Eagles. They have been married 16 years and have two children, and Craig has worked for the last 15 years as a salesman for Valassis Inserts. The company is based in the Detroit area, but Craig has the New England territory and lives near Boston.

"Life goes on," he said. "You have good experiences and you have bad, and you just do the best you can with them."

Terry Frei of The Denver Post is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. His feedback address, for emails signed with names and hometowns, is ChipHilton23@hotmail.com.