This team will not be held accountable.

They will not be held accountable by their peers, their league, their coaches, or themselves. They have made this clear. 

No, they will continue to earn, to party, to play, to live and this moment will fade. 

But at least one man on that team will eventually face a judgment day, and it will not be from the world, but judgment will come from big, adoring, admiring, loving, achingly innocent eyes looking up at him from a kitchen table. 

This little human might be wearing his jersey number, might bleed the colors of the team he plays for, might know with unwavering certainty that MY DAD is the coolest, the bravest, the best in the world.

But one day, she will watch a video of her hero winning the Olympic Gold Medal and celebrating with his team in the locker room after their win. She will hear the president of the United States call her father and disparage the women who also just won an Olympic Gold Medal. And she will hear her father laugh. 

And she will look up from her seat on that kitchen stool and she will ask, but Dad, why is that funny?

And that man, whose daughter might dream of playing hockey like her dad, will make a desperate wish that he could point to a post, a video, a statement, anything that distances himself from a predatory president and a sexist joke. 

He will wish that he could show his daughter that he told the world that in that moment he was high on the win, he could barely think, he heard the president speak, he heard the team laugh, he laughed and did not even comprehend what had happened until it was over. Because that would be enough. We make mistakes, we try to fix them, that would be enough.

He will desperately wish for any proof that he distanced himself from that president, from that joke, that he felt it incumbent on himself to recognize the grief this would cause his Team USA teammates, his family, his female fans, his community, and his daughter. 

But he will not find the proof to show his daughter. His daughter who can’t understand the humor of the joke because she has never experienced feeling less than any boy, because why would she? Her dad is a great hockey player, her dad is an American hero, her dad taught her to play hockey and she is better than any boy she knows. 

And so for the first time, those beautiful eyes will watch her dad as he tries to explain this moment, this choice, to her. And for the first time she will realize that her dreams might not mean as much to this world as her dad’s. And she might wonder for the first time, is my dad really a superhero? 

And she will come to know too early that her dad is not a superhero, he is just a man. 

And the first one to let her down.