"I Wasn't Really Thinking at All": Megan Keller on Scoring Her Golden Goal in the Winter Olympics

In the modern world, sports aren't just about what happens on the court, field, or track. Much of the buzz around athletes actually takes place before their events—that is, when they arrive at their respective venues and showcase their latest fashion creations. In basketball, that's referred to as a tunnel 'fit; in Formula One, a paddock 'fit; and so on. What athletes wear when they're not in uniform matters, especially to fans who might never get to speak to their heroes. Clothes are the perfect form of communication—a window into who your favorite athlete is and what they stand for. That's what Go Sports is all about. Yes, we care about box scores, the results of Free Practice 1 (even if it is at 3 a.m.), and RHOBH-level rivalries, but today, sports fashion matters too. We're not ashamed to say so.

"We were down 1–0—the first time we were down all tournament—but the belief and trust in our locker room never left," says Megan Keller, the Boston Fleet defender behind Team USA's gold medal–winning goal during the 2026 Winter Olympics. "I think when Laila [Edwards] had that nice shot, and Hilary [Knight] tipped that puck in to tie the game in under two minutes—not to mention break the all-time American goals and points record—that's the moment when our entire locker room really felt like, Oh, we're gonna win this game," Keller explains. "Taylor Heise made a pass that stretched three zones, and after that, I was just playing hockey," she says. In that moment, the 29-year-old from Michigan entered a flow state, relying on the skills she's spent her life honing on the ice. "I wasn't really thinking at all looking back," she says, reflecting on "the golden goal" as the media have pegged her series-winning shot 4:07 into overtime in the gold-medal game. "It went in."

Keller, who already had a gold medal from the 2018 PyeongChang Games and a silver from Shanghai in 2022, is no stranger to high-pressure moments. In addition to her accomplishments at the Winter Games, she is also a six-time World Champion and the career leader in defenseman scoring at her alma mater, Boston College, one of the top women's hockey programs in the country, with 158 goals. Since graduating in 2019, she helped found the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association (PWHPA), and in 2023, she signed with the Boston Fleet to play alongside her Team USA teammates Knight and Aerin Frankel in a new league, the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL), which has since become one of the fastest-growing professional sports leagues in history. On her team, Keller is the captain, meaning that it's her job to take the brunt of the stress off the shoulders of her 22 teammates, keeping them focused on what matters most the second they step on the ice: winning.

At the same time, Keller says it's important that she's able to lean on her teammates just as much as they lean on her, especially during the Olympics. "It's looking around the room and knowing that I have teammates that have my back every step of the way," she says. These are the people who don't fault you when you're not perfect, so you don't fault yourself. "Hockey is a game of mistakes—it's bound to happen when you're out there," Keller explains. It's how quickly you can move on and focus on the next shift that matters, and knowing you are supported goes a long way toward forgiving and forgetting in crucial minutes of play.

In the gold-medal game, when Canada went up 1–0, Keller's mental fortitude showed itself. "I was out for that goal, and I wish I could have done something differently," she says. "You're always analyzing: How can I be better on the next shift? Or, what could I do differently that play? And sometimes, fortunately, you have the chance to rewrite that," she continues. "We got the opportunity to, and that happens in hockey all the time—and in sport and in life—there's going to be failures, there's going to be things you wish you did differently, and you just have to put [them] in the rearview mirror and look on to the next task at hand." Keller believed in her teammates and herself enough to know they would come out on top no matter what, which is exactly what happened. That confidence erased any pressure on the ice that day and allowed her to make the game-winning shot.

It helps when you've been in a situation before. At the 2018 Winter Games, Team USA, Keller included, faced a similar burden against Team Canada. In the end, the USA won in a shoot-out, one of the most high-stakes scenarios in all of sport. It was the first time since women's hockey was introduced at the 1998 Winter Olympics that the American team had won gold—an accomplishment that took 20 years to re-create. "That was pretty special," she says. "Then obviously, [in] 2022, we had the heartbreak again, so to then come back to this one, it does make it a little more meaningful. After you feel that heartbreak, you never want to feel that again, [so] to get back on top is an incredibly special feeling." Many are calling this year's squad the best women's hockey lineup to ever skate for Team USA. According to ESPN, one member of the team, Hayley Scamurra, who plays for the Montreal Victoire, called it the best team she's ever played on. "We're an electric team," Keller says. "[There's] so much skill. There's so much fire. There's so much passion—I think that's what made people want to watch our team."

This year's gold-medal matchup between the USA and Canada peaked at 7.7 million viewers during overtime, averaging 5.3 million over the course of the whole game, according to Sports Business Journal. That's 1.6 million more than in 2018, the last time Team USA and Keller won gold. Much of that has to do with the eruption of women's sports that has taken place in the years since the PyeongChang Games, with the WNBA, Unrivaled, the NWSL, and the PWHL all reporting unprecedented success across multiple metrics, from TV viewership and social media engagement to ticket sales. According to a 2025 report titled "Closing the Monetization Gap in Women's Sports: A $2.5 Billion Opportunity," conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, between 2022 and 2024, revenue from women's sports grew 4.5 times faster than that of men's sports. And the peak of this rise is nowhere in sight, with the report stating that "many billions of dollars" are being left on the table "for stakeholders across the value chain."

After Team USA's gold in 2018, the team celebrated right away, going on a group trip, because there was no other hockey to get back to. That's not the case this time. A vast majority returned to their PWHL teammates almost right away, with games scheduled just days after the Winter Olympics closing ceremony. "[This] is such a great opportunity for women's hockey to build off of all the attention and viewership that the Olympics just garnered and [funnel it] right back into our pro league," Keller says. "All the players that you saw on the Olympic stage are going to be playing in this league, and [there are] probably going to be even bigger rivalries now [after] what [just] happened on the international stage." Thanks to the creation of the PWHL, the best players in women's hockey get to play in front of sold-out crowds, sometimes in NHL venues, and fans don't have to wait four years to watch their favorite athletes dominate on the ice. The teams might look different from what they did on Olympic ice, but the competition is just as elite.

When it comes to the growth of the PWHL, Keller doesn't see a limit in sight. "We're so new and young as a league, and in women's sports in general, we have so much room to grow," she says. According to her, the PWHL came at the perfect time, "riding that wave" that the NWSL, the WNBA, and other women's sports leagues built. "We can all lift each other up," she says. It's also important for her and the other players in her league who were part of its inaugural season to never forget those women who came before them, pushing boundaries and making the success of the PWHL possible. "Even if they weren't the ones to play in it, we wouldn't be here without them," she says. "Leaving the game better than when we found it is something that I think we're trying to do as a group, and the next generation after us will do the same."

One thing Keller wants to leave for the next generation of Fleet players, specifically, is a Walter Cup, the trophy awarded to the winner of the PWHL Finals. "That's what's next." The Minnesota Frost have won the Walter Cup in both the league's freshman and sophomore seasons, but Keller's set on bringing it to Boston in 2026. Down the line, she'd also like to see teams play in bigger NHL venues consistently and the league charter flights for traveling teams. "Obviously, we're not there yet, but that's a massive goal that, one day in the future, would be incredible to achieve," she says.

Megan Keller and Hilary Knight from the women's national hockey team, and Quinn and Jack Hughes from the men's national hockey team, join Connor Storrie during his monologue on Saturday Night Live— Saturday, February 28, 2026.

With records being broken on what feels like a nightly basis—the Seattle Torrent, for example, just broke the U.S. arena attendance record in its first game back post-Olympics with 17,335 fans in a sold-out game against the Toronto Sceptres at Climate Pledge Arena—these aren't just pipe dreams for PWHL players like Keller. Already in the 2025–26 season, two new teams were added to the original six when the league started, introducing the Torrent and Vancouver Goldeneyes, and league officials have expressed strong interest in continued expansion. Meanwhile, Keller and Knight, alongside the Hughes brothers from the men's Team USA squad, made appearances on Saturday Night Live alongside this weekend's host, Heated Rivalry's Connor Storrie. (Knight finished her first game back with the Fleet at around 5 p.m. ET in Ottawa, Canada, following a nail-biter shoot-out and still made it to New York City for the late taping of the popular NBC show.) Women's hockey is the talk of the sports world in the wake of the Milano-Cortina Games, and if making it to SNL is any indication, the chatter won't be quieting down anytime soon.

In other words, the stage is set for the PWHL to follow in the footsteps of fellow women's sports leagues like the WNBA and the NWSL, skyrocketing to fame both in the confines of the athletic world and the cultural landscape beyond it. Records will be broken, TV appearances will be frequent, and celebrity fans will be aplenty. (Flavor Flav's already on it.) This future for the PWHL and the talented women who play in it was always in the cards. Keller's golden goal—and every play by the rest of Team USA that made it possible—only sped up the process a little. "[It's] just [been] nonstop smiles," she says, referring to the two weeks that have passed since that shot entered the net. "My face hurts from smiling so much."