Ed- The following is an excerpt from John U. Bacon’s latest book, The Greatest Comeback, How Team Canada Fought Back, Took the Summit Series, and Reinvented Hockey. If you’re familiar with the 1972 Summit Series, according to its principles and participants this is the best and most comprehensive accounting of that incredible sports moment of many written. If this is new to you, this book is the best introduction to one of the consequential moments in sports history, when East met West, when the hubris of liberal capitalism crashed into the cheap hypocrisy of totalitarian communism. It was the battle that inspired Rocky vs Drago, and introduced North America to the beautiful game played by the Soviets. And all these guys talked. The executives, coaches, players, and superstars of the next generation who were inspired by what they saw all agreed to let Bacon craft the definitive version of one of the great sports stories of all time. Well, most of it—Mark Messier wrote the foreword. And in case the last sentence wasn’t a clue, this book is also, for my (U.S.) money, the most Canadian thing ever written. ------------------------------ In September of 1972 Team Canada opened the newly created Summit Series as one of the most heavily favored teams not merely in the history of hockey, but in the history of sports. Just about every Canadian fan, journalist, player, and coach expected the greatest hockey team ever assembled to crush its untested opponents eight games to zero. Team Canada’s leaders were so certain of victory that they traded away every advantage the Soviets could conjure, including the referees. They’ve also invited 35 players, two full teams’ worth—including Red Berenson—to their training camp in Toronto, and promised all of them that they would get into at least one game. Anticipating little competition from the Soviets, they figured they could use the older players for the first four games in Canada, then let the younger players mop up the last four games in Moscow. But that is not, of course, how it worked out. As we join the story Team Canada is now down 1-2-1 in the eight-game series, needing to win three of four in Soviet Russia to avoid a nation-shattering collapse. Three of their teammates are flying home, angry. The 300 Canadian steaks and pallets of Labatt's they had sent over have disappeared, now circulating through Moscow’s black market. Their wives are suffering every indignity the communist officials can come up with. The press is calling them thugs. The commissioner of the NHL is calling them entitled. And 85 percent of their countrymen—more than saw the moon landing—are watching. [After the jump: Coach Red is born]