This weekend, the American and Russian hockey teams squared off against each other at the Sochi Olympics and, even if, like me, you're not a fan of the sport, it was an undeniably gripping match, one that ended only after a white-knuckle shootout. Thank god it wasn't an elimination round game, though, because there was that moment with five minutes left in the game and the score tied that the Russians seemed to score a goal and an American referee disallowed it. If it had been an elimination round, there would've been no limit to the stink, no end to the conspiracy thinking.

This way, since both teams advanced to the next round, there was just a little stink, and just a little conspiracy thinking.

But what little stink there was was pungent enough. "Americans are as lawless in hockey as they are in politics," tweeted one well-connected scion of a tabloid empire, using the hashtag #AmericanCheaters. Some speculated that American goalie Jonathan Quick had deliberately moved the goalposts in a ploy to steal the game. Alexey Pushkov, who chairs the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament, ranted and railed all day on Saturday about the American referee's nationality. "How can an American referee judge a game in which the U.S. team is playing?!!" he tweeted, when the goal was disallowed. "Disgusting!" Prior to that, he had not noticed the referee's citizenship. He went on ranting the next day. "A referee doesn't have a nationality?!" he wrote. "Everyone has one, but he doesn't? How interesting. So how come they didn't assign a Russian ref instead of an American one?"

Last night, television host and arch-obscurantist Dmitry Kiselev explained to viewers of Russia's main evening news show on Russian state-owned television why the goal was disallowed and the Americans allowed to win. You may know Kiselev as the man from the rant about disallowing, not goals, but organ donations by gays, saying they should instead be buried in the ground and burned. Last night, he weighed in on the shadowy workings of hockey. "The American television company NBC paid nearly $2 billion for the right to broadcast the Sochi Olympics," he said. "That's about as much as all the world's other television companies combined. What, did they pay $2 billion to show their team losing? No. In other words, we're dealing with a situation that in English is called 'money talks.'"

All this despite the statement from the referee supervisor of the International Ice Hockey Federation, a Russian, that the referee's ruling had been correct. Despite the coach of the Russian team saying, "I couldn't see from where I was sitting. The referees watched the video, then made this decision. That means it was correct." Despite the fact that Russian hockey legend and president of the Russian Hockey Federation Vladislav Tretyak said that, after watching the videos, the decision was "indisputable." "The verdict was reached in complete accordance with the rules," Tretyak said after the game. Tretyak, let's recall, was deemed important and patriotic enough to light the Olympic torch at the opening ceremony.