Team USA Hero Jack Hughes Won’t Get Golden Goal Puck Because It Doesn’t Belong to Him

Team USA star Jack Hughes clinched the Americans’ win over Canada in the Olympic men’s hockey final in Milan last month with his clutch golden goal in overtime. While Hughes got to take home a gold medal, he won’t get to take home his game-winning puck.

The puck, as fate would have it, remains up north in Toronto in the Hockey Hall of Fame. And it’s going to stay there, according to Hall of Fame curator Philip Pritchard.

Despite Hughes’s ardent pleas to get his golden goal puck back, it has already been officially donated to the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), which in part helped set up this year’s Olympic tournament. The IIHF has been in charge of collecting historic items from the Olympics and world championship tournaments dating back to 1998, per Pritchard, and that includes Hughes’s puck.

Pritchard had a very funny way of telling Hughes the puck wasn’t his to keep:

“Unfortunately, in the easiest words, it was never Jack’s puck to own,” Pritchard told ESPN on Wednesday. “It's been donated to us now. For every artifact that’s been donated, we have a paper trail and signed paperwork of where it’s come from.”

“We try to take the emotion out of it. We're here to preserve a game that Jack's lucky enough to play or we're lucky enough to work in,” Pritchard continued. “That's why the Hockey Hall of Fame museum exists as an institution: We're preserving the game of the past, present and the future.”

Hughes previously called it “bulls---“ that the Hockey Hall of Fame was keeping his piece of history. “I don’t see why Megan Keller or I shouldn’t have those pucks,” Hughes said. Keller scored the game-winning goal in the U.S. women’s hockey team’s 2-1 overtime win over Canada in the gold medal match, and her golden goal puck is also encased at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Hughes’s displeasure about not being able to own his personal Winter Olympics memento isn’t shared by all NHL players, however. The Hockey Hall of Fame also kept Sidney Crosby’s golden goal puck from the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, when Canada defeated the United States in overtime in the gold medal match.

Crosby, who was injured during Canada’s silver medal-winning run in Milan in what was likely his final Olympics, recently addressed Hughes’s comments about wanting his puck back:

“I didn’t even think about it that way, to be honest with you,” the longtime Penguins captain told The Athletic. “I was just happy that I scored the goal. I was happy that the puck was going to the Hall of Fame. I didn’t even think about it that way.”

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