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What was Knight thinking when it went in? “We’re going to win the game,” she said.
Team USA captain Hilary Knight (right) skated a victory lap with fellow two-time Olympic champion Kendall Coyne Schofield in Milan. Hassan Ammar
February 20, 2026 | 10:17 AM
4 minutes to read
MILAN — It was only fitting that Hilary Knight was in the middle of it all.
As the United States women’s hockey team prepared to receive their gold medals Thursday after a 2-1 win over Canada in overtime, the players lined up in numerical order. There was No. 21 in the center, with 12 teammates on one side and 10 on the other.
Knight was in the middle of it an hour earlier, too, when a shot from Laila Edwards ricocheted off her stick and into the net with 2:04 to play in regulation.
What was Knight thinking when it went in?
“We’re going to win the game.”
Knight has been here before. She made her debut with the national team as a teenager. She was a captain in her first Olympics, in 2010. She’s never left a Games without a medal (two golds, three silvers).
In October, she announced this would be her final Olympics. At 36, she’s reaching the end of her career — a career in which she contributed to nearly every iteration of professional women’s hockey in Boston for more than a decade, from the CWHL’s Blades (2012-15) to the NWHL’s Pride (2015-18), to becoming the first captain of the PWHL’s Fleet in 2023.
So when she declares she’ll win before the game is over, she knows what she’s talking about.
“It’s a special feeling,” she said of the moment she scored. “It’s a rare feeling, but you get that feeling with this group.”
Knight has called this squad “the best US hockey team I’ve ever been a part of.” Expectations were sky high. The only team that had a chance of stopping the Americans was Canada, and the United States won, 5-0, in the preliminary round.
But all the predictions and previous success meant little with Team USA trailing and time quickly running off the clock.
It was that moment when Knight scored the goal that changed everything in this game — and set the record for most goals and points by an American woman at the Olympics.
“It’s just classic Hilary Knight,” teammate Lee Stecklein said.
It was her 15th career goal and her 33rd point. Stecklein called Knight “the best player of all time” and you’d have a hard time finding someone here in Milan to refute that.
But it’s the quiet leadership that Knight brings that helped Team USA deliver on what everyone believed it could do.
“She’s a person who leads by example, for sure,” defender and Salem, N.H., native Caroline Harvey said. “She just instills that confidence.”
You can call what Knight did — score the goal that sent the game to OT, set a record while doing it, in the final minutes of your final Olympics — a lot of things.
The word Kendall Coyne Schofield used?
“Poetic.”
Hilary Knight enjoyed a cruise past the Canadian bench on her way to celebrating the tying goal with her American teammates. – Hassan Ammar
Knight and Coyne Schofield have skated alongside each other on the national team since 2011. Together, they led the heroic fight for the future of professional women’s hockey in the United States when they convinced a group of the nation’s best players to boycott the ramshackle leagues they were playing in and demand better. The two were some of the first players signed to contracts in the PWHL in 2023 — Coyne Schofield by Minnesota, Knight by her adopted hometown of Boston.
Knight has been around the game for so long that a number of the players she skates with on Team USA have photos of them as children posing with Knight at a hockey camp. Harvey and Edwards said they chose to play for Wisconsin because Knight went there, too.
“Just to even be a very small part of what Hilary’s accomplished, I’m so honored,” Edwards said. “And to learn from her every day, it’s just been such a blessing.”
During the 15-minute break between regulation and overtime, Knight asked her teammates: “Who’s going to be the hero?”
It was Megan Keller, who Knight smiled at as she shared that story while they were seated on the dais, medals around their necks. The Fleet captain scored the game-winner to give the Americans their third Olympic gold. She picked up the “C” on her chest when Knight was left unprotected by the Fleet and promptly got scooped up by expansion club Seattle.
Players like Edwards and Harvey will soon join Knight in the PWHL, a league that has her fingerprints all over it. While her national-team career may be over, there are still 16 games left in the league’s regular season.
But as for ending her Olympics this way? It doesn’t surprise the people who know her best.
“Hilary always goes out with a bang,” Coyne Schofield said, and she wasn’t kidding.
Knight surprised everyone — her coaches, her teammates, her family — when she proposed to longtime girlfriend and Olympic speedskater Brittany Bowe on Wednesday. The couple got to know each other at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, taking socially distanced walks in masks around the athletes’ village during the COVID pandemic.
“I think I was more nervous for the proposal than I was for the gold-medal game, to be honest,” Knight said with a laugh.
Sharing news of the proposal (she said maybe she shouldn’t have just posted a video and not looked at her phone for hours) was a refreshing bit of vulnerability and spontaneity from Knight, who has always put the team before herself, highlighting not her numerous accolades but the achievements of others.
It’s only fitting the last time out, she did it her way.
“The greatest to do it,” Coyne Schofield said, “and you literally can’t script it any better.”
