At Summit Series in Moscow, Canadians Ask, "Where's the Beef?" In Canada, all that matters is this: we won. Forty years ago Friday, Canada beat the Soviets in Moscow in the final and deciding game of the 1972 Summit Series. It could have gone either way, as the sportscasters say: a last-minute goal by Paul Henderson was the difference. It was not even a glorious goal. It was more of a desperate shunting of the puck over the line, after which a show-shovel raised high in celebration might have been more appropriate than a stick. Canadians know now why their team won: the game is ours + Canadian heart (almost) always trumps foreign skill + in the battle between our way of life versus theirs, no contest + nobody was going to stop Henderson that week in Moscow. Yet in the flurry of this month's 40th anniversary commemorations, was the fiercest of fuels in Team Canada's Moscow fire forgotten? Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that the greatest of Canadian hockey triumphs boils down to this: they never should have messed with our chow. Canadian hockey teams going overseas have often carried their own meat with them. According to The Ottawa Citizen, the East York Lyndhursts went to Sweden to contest the 1954 world championships "armed with a fighting spirit and a supply of vitamin pills." In 1958, a member of the Whitby Dunlops arranged for his employer, Canada Packers, to send 150 steaks to Oslo to aid in the team's effort. Whereas teams like the Trail Smoke Eaters, who in 1961 braved the local Czechoslovakian menu, were flustered to find eggs floating in their delicious asparagus soup. That's the kind of thing the Canadians wanted to avoid in 1972. Heading over to Moscow, they wanted to be sure that there was a small corner of a foreign kitchen that would be, temporarily at least, made-in-Canada. So they brought their own steaks and lots of beer. But the Soviets pilfered it all. It's a tale of woe that has long been woven into the legend of that momentous September, a whodunit that has been revived in several new books this fall, including memoirs by Paul Henderson and Brad Park. Team Canada was brimming with groceries when it arrived in Moscow on Sept. 20 all those years ago. Henderson said they were packing 300 pounds. Coach Harry Sinden's '72 memoir, "Hockey Showdown," said it was 300 steaks. In his 2003 autobiography, "Thunder and Lightning," Phil Esposito said Team Canada arrived in Moscow with 350 cases of beer, 350 cases of milk, 350 cases of soda. That means they had 8,400 beers for nine days in Moscow, for a contingent of, say, 50 guys, players, staff and officials. That is an allowance of 168 bottles for every man, or about 18.6 for each of the nine days they were in Moscow. A few extenuating circumstances to consider: on Sept. 20 the team did not get in until 8 p.m., which doesn't leave a lot of time to down 18.6 beers. And what about the four disgruntled players who decided in the first few days that they were heading back home? I'm going to assume the defectors didn't take their fair share of beers or steaks with them, as much fun as it is to imagine that they did. Piecing together accounts from Henderson, Park and Rod Gilbert over the years, about 100 cases of beer disappeared after the fifth game. You could see why the players were cranky. I'm not just talking about Bobby Clarke going after Valeri Kharlamov's ankle, or J.P. Parise threatening referees. To read the 1972 memoirs is to feel a remarkable heat of angry disgust, not just at the harassment to which the players felt they were being subjected, but to the general Moscowness of the place. The buses were late, Ron Ellis wrote in "Over The Boards." Vic Hadfield summed up the place in "Vic Hadfield's Diary From Moscow To The Play-offs": "Uuggh." A gray place, said Frank Mahovlich. The only good thing about the whole entire country, according to Henderson, was the circus. "Just terrible," he wrote. Everything's so dull - even the people. There's no life to it. Esposito said he wanted to kill the KGB spies that traveled on the Canadian bus, with a gun. As for the steaks, goalie Ed Johnston later said that a lot of them never made it through customs. Hadfield wrote: "There must be a lot of thieves in Moscow. We brought our own beef with us - a lot of steaks - and they've been stolen. So has the Canadian beer, which we had shipped here. Everybody suspects sabotage. But Ken Dryden reported in 1973's "Face-Off At The Summit" that the steaks the team enjoyed at the hotel on their first night were excellent. According to Dryden, the real problem was that after a few days - "the great initial burst of big steaks" - the cuts began to shrink. Also, their cola was missing, causing Dryden to suffer a "Coke fit" one day after practice. Mahovlich was on to the hotel's chefs. "They cut them in half, so we only had half a steak," he recalled, most recently in this fall's "Team Canada 1972: The Official 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Summit Series." So we complained. Before the third game, they cut the thickness in half. We complained again. It wasn't until the last game that we finally got a whole steak. The ones that the profiteers didn't get, that is. "The Russian cooks sold the steaks to others in search of a decent meal, many of whom turned out to be our zany Canadian fans," Henderson wrote. For about ten dollars U.S. you could get just about anything you wanted, including those precious steaks! The only two Russian dishes that were acceptable to me were borscht and chicken Kiev. The rest was just terrible. For all their suffering, the players' lot was better than what their wives had to endure. "I guess what we're getting to eat is better than what our wives are being served," Dryden wrote in his Moscow memoir. In fact, Lynda and some other wives came to the door at lunch and asked for handouts. According to Park, this was where the Soviets really screwed up: by angering the wives with disrespect and disgusting food. Before the last game, the Canadians had a team meeting. The coaches wanted to make sure that everybody knew just how quickly the team was going to get out of town after the game. Then the players went for their naps and a pregame supper. "We should have had 100 steaks left for our pre-game meal, but the Russians somehow misplaced them," Sinden wrote after the Canadians won Game 8 that night. They claim it was poor Canadian arithmetic. In this country four times 50 is 300. We thought it was 200. So the kitchen staff here at the Intourist Hotel will have a few steak dinners on us in the next few weeks. I hope they choke on it like their team did on the ice tonight. Stephen Smith lives in Toronto. He writes for puckstruck.com, a blog about hockey history and literature.