Canada Reclaim Gold and Lustre

Ice hockey-mad Canadians have left the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in euphoria after beating their oldest rivals, the United States, 5-2 in the final to win gold.

Joe Sakic collected two goals and two assists as Canada captured their first Olympic men's ice hockey gold medal in 50 years.

Canada climbed back to the top of the ice hockey world with a team built by national hero Wayne Gretzky that weathered intense criticism early in the tournament but won its final three games to silence the doubters.

Just eight months after leading the Colorado Avalanche to the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup, Sakic figured in all but one of Canada's goals and was named the tournament's most valuable player.

Canada never trailed in the match, after Sakic helped open the scoring when heset up Jarome Iginla with 87 seconds left in the opening period.

The United States, bidding for their first gold medal in the sport since 1980, tied the score in the second quarter, but Sakic again came through.

With the Canadians on the power play - a one-man advantage while the US had a player in the sin bin - he snapped a wrist shot from the left through a clutch of bodies and past goaltender Mike Richter for his third goal of the tournament.

Sakic also picked up an assist when he set Iginla up again in the final period and sent Canada into delirium with 80 seconds remaining when he beat Richter on a breakaway.

Canada won a record 17 medals at these Games but the last was the only one that mattered for most of the 30 million Canadians who had agonised through an ice hockey gold medal drought that had lasted half a century.

Not since the 1952 Oslo Olympics, when a team side comprised entirely of the Edmonton Mercurys climbed to the top of the podium, had the Canadian national anthem rang through a hockey arena at a Winter Games.

And the thousands of Canadian supporters in the stadium could not wait to let out decades of pent-up frustration, breaking out in a rendition of "Oh Canada" as the final minute counted down.

"The Canadian people are probably having a great time from coast-to-coast," said Gretzky, now Canada's executive director. "They've waited a long time for this.

"It's like anything else you win, you get bragging rights for a while and we haven't had it for some time. This is something our country needed, we needed to win this tournament."

The gold shortage was expected to end four years ago in Japan. But Canada returned home without a medal, the team's fourth place finish viewed as a national embarrassment and politicians convened a hockey summit to determine what went wrong.

After a dismal fourth-placed finish in Nagano four years ago, and with its status as the world's pre-eminent hockey nation increasingly open to discussion, Canada called upon Gretzky, known as "The Great One", to restore the country's battered reputation.

When Canada opened this year's Olympic tournament with a demoralising 5-2 loss to Sweden and a less-than-uplifting 3-2 victory over unheralded Germany however, things didn't look good.

"They have a certain pride about their hockey," admitted US captain Chris Chelios. "You look at what Mario (Lemieux) said yesterday, that it's Canada's game... We've had to listen to that.

"It might be the only game they're good at except for maybe curling and couple of other things," Chelios added magnanimously.

Comments like that will only make Canada's victory sweeter. The critics were silenced and so were the hosts.