When the Summit Series began on September 2, 1972, Cold War tensions could not have been higher. But that was the whole point of setting up this unprecedented hockey series. Team Canada, featuring the country’s best players—all NHL stars, half of them future Hall of Famers—would play an eight-game series, with four games played across Canada followed by four in Moscow. Almost everyone expected Team Canada to crush their untried opponents eight games to zero, with backups playing the last four games.

At fifteen, Willie Horton received his first contract offer to become a professional baseball player. At twenty, he smacked his first major-league home run. At twenty-four, Horton stood in full uniform on the hood of his car, in the midst of burning homes and overturned vehicles, and pleaded for an end to the violence of the 1967 Detroit riots. In this new autobiography, Horton shares the fascinating story of his life and career, from growing up in Detroit's Jeffries Projects as the youngest of twenty-one children to winning a World Series with his hometown Tigers in 1968.

When John U. Bacon played for the Ann Arbor Huron High School River Rats, he never scored a goal. Yet somehow, years later he found himself leading his alma mater’s downtrodden program. How bad? The team hadn’t won a game in over a year, making them the nation’s worst squad. With almost everyone expecting more failure, Bacon made it special to play for Huron by making it hard, which inspired the players to excel. Then he defied conventional wisdom again by putting the players in charge of team discipline, goal-setting, and even decision-making—and it worked.

Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach, and they engineered perhaps the greatest sports moment of the 20th century. Their "Miracle on Ice" has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable. It is a legacy of hope, hard work, and homegrown triumph. It is a chronicle of everyday heroes who just wanted to play hockey happily ever after.

SEPTEMBER 2, 1972, MONTREAL FORUM, GAME ONE: The best against the best for the first time. Canada, the country that had created the game; the Soviet Union, having taken it up only twenty-six years earlier. On the line: more than the players, more than the fans, more than Canadians and Russians knew. So began an entirely improbable, near-month-long series of games that became more and more riveting, until, for the eighth, and final, and deciding game—on a weekday, during work and school hours all across the country—the nation stopped.