You young'uns will have no memory of the heady feeling of the early 1980s that after a period of "malaise," things were finally heading America's way. If your formative years were post-Reagan, you probably won't quite "get" what a morale booster it was for the US hockey team to defeat the Soviets in the Lake Placid Olympics (for one thing, the Olympics themselves were a bigger deal because they were competitions for amateurs. Part of what made it a "miracle on ice" was that the Soviet team was professional, and ours wasn't).
And then the next year, Amanda McKerrow, all of 17, won a major ballet competition in Moscow that no American had ever won. Nice profile of her.
