U.S. has overtaken Canada in women's hockey. Can Poulin turn back the tide?

At every international hockey tournament for, oh, the past two decades, the Canadian women's team has essentially played two different competitions.

There's the one against every team that isn't the United States, in which the only question is goal differential, as Canada, almost without exception, rolls to victory.

And then there's the one against Canada's neighbor and rival, in which the only question is who will come out on the right end of a hard-fought, close-run gold-medal game between the powerhouses.

But these Winter Olympics have brought a previously unheard-of question to the mix: Does Canada even stand a chance?

Much of the action in Milan has gone to script. Canada blasted Finland 5-0 on Thursday, finishing off its non-U.S. games with a perfect 3-0 record and a 14-1 goal count in its favor.

However, the Canadians also lost 5-0 to the Americans in their other round-robin game, and that lopsided score doesn't fully reflect how dominant the United States was. In the last five competitive games against Team USA, Canada has been outscored 29-7.

Oh, and captain Marie-Philip Poulin, who has scored seven goals in four previous Olympic finals against the United States, is hurt. Her status going into the knockout rounds remains uncertain.

Canada may have won five of the past six gold medals in women's hockey, but another Olympic title feels like it would need an act of divine intervention.

So, what happened? How did Hockey Canada get so thoroughly pantsed by its longtime adversary?

The most discussed explanation is age. Canada went with a veteran lineup stacked with victors of the gold-medal wars. A dozen of the players on the roster are at least 30 years old; Team USA has half that many. The Americans also have nine players under 24, while the Canadians have none. Additionally, seven NCAA players are on the U.S. roster, but not one is wearing a maple leaf.

On the ice, the impact has been undeniable. The Canadians have struggled to contain the Americans' speed in recent meetings, and every one of Team USA's scorers in the 5-0 rout in Milan was 23 or younger.

Whether Hockey Canada could have matched the U.S. youth with its own is another question. From the outside, it looks like Canada's management group valued players with big-game experience over youth. But head coach Troy Ryan, who was behind the bench when Canada won gold four years ago in Beijing, has said the brain trust assembled the best roster it could, regardless of age. Put another way: Canada's younger players weren't good enough to crack it.

That seems hard to believe - there wasn't a single Canadian player in her early 20s, whether in the PWHL or NCAA, ready to make this lineup? But Ryan attributes the U.S. surge to a strong cohort of young players blossoming at the right time.

Another factor that has likely hampered Team Canada is the sea change in women's hockey brought on by the PWHL. Before that league formed, the Canadian national team held six-month training camps in which players lived, practiced, and played exhibition games against junior men. The rigorous process churned out sharp, cohesive teams.

However, today's players arrived in Milan almost straight from their PWHL teams after the league paused for the Olympics. It's an adjustment for everyone, but the Canadians might have felt it more than most.

Some in the game suggest that the American dominance so far at this Olympics is just the beginning: that the U.S. youth-development system and the rapidly expanding number of strong NCAA programs will produce elite players at such a high rate that Canada will struggle to keep up.

There's another side to that coin. Canada has always produced excellent women's hockey players because of the country's high participation rates, so it hasn't needed to reconsider how it identifies and develops young talent.

But similar sentiments were said on the men's side a few decades ago, when it became clear that Canada no longer had a monopoly on young talent. After the Canadian men finished out of the medals at the 2006 Olympics, there were practically calls for a public inquiry into the reasons behind the failure.

It's too early to say that Milan will lead to such a reckoning for the Canadian women's program. The team advanced to the knockout rounds and hopes to get Poulin back in the lineup soon, possibly as early as Saturday's quarterfinal against Germany. Two more wins, and Canada returns to the Olympic final, where Team USA will almost certainly be waiting.

And then all those gold medalists will have another chance to prove that Hockey Canada wasn't wrong when it decided to bet on them.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.