MILAN — Call them the Cardiac Canadians.
There was no Sidney Crosby for Canada on Friday, and there was almost no gold medal game either, as for the second straight match at these Olympics, the favored Canadians trailed in the final period.
Two days after pulling out an overtime win against Czechia after tying the game with under four minutes to go, Canada completed another captain-less comeback, overcoming a two-goal deficit to win 3-2 on Nathan MacKinnon’s power-play goal with 35.2 seconds left in regulation and advance to Sunday’s gold medal game.
In a match that crescendoed like an opera a few miles away at La Scala, Canada appeared entirely on the back foot through 40 minutes.
Even after Sam Reinhart’s power-play goal cut a 2-0 deficit in half 14:20 into the second, Finland looked uniquely poised to hold a lead.
Defensive hockey is part of the spine of Finland’s hockey identity. They played Friday with superb structure, keeping Canada out of the middle of the ice and forcing the likes of Nathan MacKinnon and Macklin Celebrini to play sped up and harried, settling for one-and-done looks from the perimeter.
The shell into which they retreated in the third period, though, would have been a lot for anyone. You would have been forgiven, at points, for not knowing when a Finnish stick had last touched the puck.
So it was not altogether a shock at 10:34 of the period when Shea Theodore’s one-timer went through a wicker-basket of traffic to beat Juuse Saros, tie the game at two and prompt a scarlet-clad group hug with No. 27 in the middle.
The tie game didn’t mean any letup in Canada’s pressure, and with 2:35 left in regulation, MacKinnon drew a high stick on Niko Mikkola.
And with two seconds to go on that power play, and 35.2 seconds to go in the game, MacKinnon wired in a one-timer from the left circle off Connor McDavid’s feed to blow the roof off Santagiulia Arena and send Canada to the gold-medal game.
Finland challenged the zone entry for offside, but review confirmed that Macklin Celebrini was onside, if by the width of his skate blade.
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For the second game in a row, Canada trailed, this time from late in the first period.
Sam Bennett was taken for goaltender interference after barreling his Panthers teammate Mikkola into Juuse Saros and it took all of a few seconds for the Finns to capitalize on a Mikko Rantanen one-timer off the ensuing faceoff.
The Finns got another special teams goal, this one shorthanded, off an Erik Haula breakaway early in the second.
Even with Canada’s wealth of talent, even with Tom Wilson running around and hitting everything in sight and even with the Mach3 line — MacKinnon, Celebrini and Connor McDavid — reunited, Canada seemed to be without much of an answer.
Finland, gold medalists in the NHL-less 2022 Olympics, was coming to upset the USA-Canada party everyone had planned for the gold medal game for the last year.
Just like Czechia, though, the Finns succumbed to the critical mass of talent and the inflow of pressure.
And however nervy it was to a nation that is ready to live or die with Canada’s performance at this tournament, the Canadians are going to defend their best-on-best title on Sunday.
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