Canada will play Russia in the gold medal game today at 1pm at the IIHF U20 World Championships for the first time in four years. It used to be expected that Canada would play in the final of this series, and usually against Russia, but in the past ten years of tournaments, Canada only played in the gold medal round four times, and only won twice.
The world has been catching up to Canada talent wise, and the expected dominance hasn’t always shown itself. This year we get a throwback to those years where we’d win five tournaments in a row and beat Russia in the finals for most of those golds.