Quotes from Wayne Coffey

The most enduring heroes are people who don't try to be.

The men were famous once. Some of them still are. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and Brooks had brought them together, 24 summers before. He had picked them and provoked them and pushed them, sometimes irritating them and often infuriating them by his hardness and his aloofness, his scathing rebukes and his unrelenting mind games.

The 1962 Mets went 40-120, losing more games than any ball club in the twentieth century and finishing 60½ games out of first place.

The 1962 Mets went 40-120, losing more games than any ball club in the twentieth century and finishing 60½ games out of first place. This is not easy to do.

The '62 Mets made 3 errors in their first game, 3 in their last game, and 204 more errors in between.

You push on, do your best, and if you are really brave, you dream big, doubts and fears be damned. This is the stuff that miracles are made of, and the proof was there to see, on February 22, 1980.

It was Seaver himself who called the Mets' triumph "the greatest collective victory by any team in sports," an observation as brilliantly on target as any knee-high curveball on the outside corner that he threw all season.

It's impossible for me to separate the miracle that we achieved as a team with the memories and gratitude I have for all the people who helped me get there, from my mother and father, my sisters and brothers, to 10 years worth of coaches and friends and teammates.

You don't make a journey like that alone. You make it with a lot of love and sacrifice. That's probably why I was searching the stands for my father after we won the gold medal against Finland. It was a moment that was begging to be shared.

There are a million things a coach can't control. Brooks, an obsessive planner, was going to make sure he was on top of what he could control.

Brooks punished them in drills on the ice and gave them a 300-question test to assess their psychological makeup off it. He was relentless. If they couldn't take this small sampling of life under Brooks, they wouldn't last through one Olympic practice shift.