Canada gets burned by another too-many-men miss, this time in the gold medal game

For a stretch, Team USA appeared to have six skaters out there, and one of them even made contact with the puck before play continued.

That is the part that makes fans snap, because touching the puck is the bright line everyone knows.

You could hear it too, the “ref wake up” chant rolling through the arena like a wave.
In a gold medal game, a missed bench minor is not a tiny oops. It can flip the whole script.

Canada should have been handed a power play, and instead they got nothing but momentum draining away.

This is why the mistake hits harder today, because we literally just watched another “too many men” miss in Canada’s quarterfinal earlier this week.

Czechia’s Ondrej Palat scored on a play where it appeared the Czechs had six men out, and the officials never called it.

That controversy got so loud that the IIHF ended up acknowledging the error in public comments afterward.

Canadian fans are exhausted, not because calls always go your way, but because the standard keeps moving shift to shift.

McDavid came into this final as the tournament’s points leader with 11, and you could see him hunting for any edge on every change.

Matt Boldy opened the scoring early, and Cale Makar dragged Canada back level late in the second, so every single special teams chance matters.

When refs miss a too-many-men that includes a puck touch, it is not “let them play,” it is “we missed it.”

And the brutal part is the ripple effect, because benches stop trusting what will get called next.

If Canada loses a one-goal game, this moment is going to live forever in the replay loop.
Gold medal hockey is supposed to be about stars between the dots, not extra bodies at the bench door.