Knight vision
Goalie helps Team USA barrel past Canada for world title
The barrel is important. Not as important as the gold medals hanging around the neck of the goaltender from Darien and his American teammates — yet still important.
The barrel helped deliver a focused message, helped inspire, was misconstrued as a slight to another nation and, ultimately, helped Spencer Knight lead Team USA to the world junior ice hockey championship in Edmonton, Alberta.
“One of the people on our staff, not a player, legit ordered a barrel on like Amazon and got it shipped to our hotel,” Knight said Tuesday. “A brand-new barrel; it came in and our team doctor was walking around the lobby with this ginormous box. Everybody’s like, what the heck does this guy have?” He had the barrel.
“Each morning,” Knight said, “we’d get this newsletter, with quotes and updates, and one of the first ones right before the start of the tournament was the story of crossing the Sahara Desert.”
After Knight had stopped 34 shots in the 2-0 victory over heavily favored Canada last week for the Americans’ first world junior title since 2017, coach Nate Leaman explained the story in the postgame news conference. Ron Rolston had told it when Leaman was an assistant at the 2007 tournament:
Deep in Algeria, there’s a flat, remote area called the Tanezrouft of more than 500 miles with no water, no grass, nothing except sand that shifts to cover up tracks. The legend is that migrating birds land by people just for some com