RED, WHITE, BLUE AND...GOLD!

NAGANO, Japan —  I realized at a young age that I couldn’t be Mickey Mantle, even though I was a better hitter than my brother--from both sides of the plate. So I settled for pretending to be Mickey Mantle’s daughter.

That’s what girls did, it seemed. We dreamed of being something but often settled for something less, either because there was no opportunity to achieve what we wanted or because we felt compelled to defer to what our male relatives thought was best for us.

When Cammi Granato was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, she didn’t want to be like Denis Savard of the Blackhawks. She wanted to be Savard. When A.J. Mleczko was a kid in Connecticut, tagging along with her brother to play hockey, she wanted to be Kelly Kisio and some of the other players she admired on the New York Rangers.

They were laughed at. They were told girls shouldn’t play hockey because it was a sport for boys. Their neighbors scolded their parents for letting them play. They had to tuck their hair under their helmets and register under their initials or male first names to be allowed to play.

But they played. And it wasn’t necessary to understand or like women’s hockey to be touched by the spirit Granato, Mleczko and the rest of the U.S. women’s team brought to these gray, passionless Games on Tuesday when they won the gold medal at the first women’s Olympic tournament.

They wanted to be here. They sacrificed to be here. For them, this is the pinnacle of their athletic lives. Their male counterparts have given every indication they regard this whole experience as an annoyance. When Brett Hull said he’s as committed to the Olympic effort as the next guy, no one realized the next guy was sitting on the adjacent bar stool with Hull, Chris Chelios and other U.S. players at a Nagano night spot in the early morning after a game.

It was shameful that only a few players from the U.S. men’s team showed up at Big Hat arena for the women’s 3-1 victory over Canada. Ray Bourque found the time to cheer for the Canadian women. So did Wayne Gretzky, Rob Blake, Patrick Roy, Keith Primeau, Adam Foote and Chris Pronger. Eric Lindros rose to his feet several times to lead ovations. Rob Zamuner waved a Canadian flag to stir applause for the Canadian women’s valiant effort.

The U.S. men were in a team meeting that coincided with the women’s game, even though Coach Ron Wilson and several players had declared they would attend to show their support. That’s the kind of support the women used to get--no support at all. Not that it stopped them.

And it’s the U.S. men’s loss. They missed a game that had enough emotional resonance to slice through the thick layers of cynicism and fatigue that form among journalists by this stage of the Games.

Who couldn’t be happy for Granato? Or for 5-foot-1, 128-pound Lisa Brown-Miller, who gave up the security of coaching the women’s hockey team at Princeton but almost quit the U.S. team a couple of years ago? When her husband told her, “Come February 1998, I don’t want to see you sitting on the couch and having regrets because you didn’t try out for that team,” she realized she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try to be part of this. She tried and she won, but victory was not hers alone.

This was a triumph for anyone, male or female, whose dream has ever been ridiculed. It was a victory for whatever innocence remains in sports, for everyone who competes for the love of a sport and not for the financial rewards.

It was not the most beautiful hockey game ever played. To anyone accustomed to the speed and finishing skills of NHL players, the women’s gold-medal game--like most women’s games--was slow and occasionally frustrating. Players know what to do with the puck, but their lack of arm and upper-body strength limits the length of their passes. Their legs aren’t as muscular as those of male players, so they don’t skate as swiftly. I’m not sure I would pay to see games in a women’s professional hockey league if one is ever established.

That said, it was impossible not to feel happy for the U.S. women Tuesday or to identify with them and their struggles for respect. I suspect many male sportswriters felt the same.

We can all see something of ourselves in the female hockey players, who look more like “real” people than do the doll-like figure skaters or 7-foot behemoth basketball players we have put on pedestals. We can feel happy for them as athletes who were given so little, yet made so much of it. It doesn’t matter if their gold-medal triumph spurs the start of a women’s professional league. If it becomes a reminder of why people dream, why they persevere in the face of ridicule and daunting odds, that’s triumph enough.