On Wednesday, the U.S. women’s national ice-hockey team will play for the gold medal, against Canada. This matchup was expected: since women’s hockey was added to the Olympics, in 1998, the two teams have faced off in the finals in every Winter Games save one—2006, in Turin, when Sweden upset the U.S. in the semifinals. This time, the U.S. and Canada both clobbered their semifinals opponents (Finland and the Olympic Athletes from Russia, respectively) 5–0. Canada has beaten the U.S. the last three times they’ve met, but the American team, which has a roster loaded with collegiate stars, world champions, and returning Olympians, is not exactly a scrappy underdog. Even so, getting to Pyeongchang at all was not a foregone conclusion for this team.

Last March, the players of the U.S. women’s team announced that they would forfeit the chance to defend their world title, citing a year of fruitless negotiations with U.S.A. Hockey, the sport’s governing body, over wages and support. The World Championships were slated to be held on the Americans’ home turf, in Plymouth, Michigan, and the team had won six of the last eight world titles. “We are asking for a living wage and for USA Hockey to fully support its programs for women and girls and stop treating us like an afterthought,” the team’s captain, Meghan Duggan, said in a statement at the time. “We have represented our country with dignity and deserve to be treated with fairness and respect.” U.S.A. Hockey provided the athletes with only a thousand dollars each month during the team’s six-month Olympic-residency period—many élite players, but not all, also receive stipends from the U.S. Olympic Committee—meaning that a team member’s monthly pay from U.S.A. Hockey, after taxes, was barely enough to pay for a pair of tickets to her own Olympic gold-medal match. (On Tuesday, the cheapest remaining tickets were selling for nearly four hundred dollars each.) Between Olympics seasons, U.S.A. Hockey paid “virtually nothing,” lawyers for the players said. Roughly half of the team’s members hold second and even third jobs, and many others rely on financial support from family members. (As in soccer, the situation is entirely different for the men’s national team. For instance, the men don’t share hotel rooms, as many of the female players do. The men also, unlike the women, fly business class, not coach. According to team handbooks, U.S.A. Hockey also covered the cost of disability insurance for male players but not for the women.)

The threat of a boycott paid off: before the World Championships began, at the end of March, the women reached a four-year deal with U.S.A. Hockey, and then went on to win another title. In the new deal, U.S.A. Hockey will reportedly pay each player around seventy thousand dollars annually; should the team win Olympic gold, 2018 salaries could reach into six figures. An advisory group was formed to advance girls’ and women’s hockey. Pay and benefits discrepancies weren’t the last bits of controversy to surround the women’s team, however. In September, as the team trained in Tampa, Florida, and Hurricane Irma approached, an agent for the Winter Olympics wondered why U.S.A. Hockey was not evacuating the group. (By comparison, the Tampa Bay Lightning, an N.H.L. team, chartered a flight to get a hundred and fifty people—players and members of their families—out of the area.) U.S.A. Hockey released a statement saying that the team was not in an evacuation zone, and that plans were “in place to move to an evacuation center if necessary.” Eventually, the team did, in fact, have to leave Tampa and go to a shelter.

“Indirectly, it ended up being a great team-bonding experience,” the forward Brianna Decker told USA Today, after the team had spent nearly twenty-four hours in a shelter in Wesley Chapel, Florida. “Hanging out together for that long, we still all got along and it showed a lot about our team.” Duggan added that it was like having “a giant sleepover in a very secure area.” They passed the time, in part, by playing board games.

FURTHER READING Coverage by New Yorker writers of the 2018 Winter Olympics.

That intimate team dynamic is something that not all female hockey players get to experience when they’re younger, when the best of them often play with boys and so do not share a locker room with their teammates. The defender Kacey Bellamy, from the age of eleven to thirteen, was among those who played on a boys’ team. “The locker room is such a sacred place for any athlete, especially [in] a team sport, and not being able to be there and prepare for a game—just small talk—that’s probably the biggest thing for me,” she said about her time playing with boys, when she felt “not really welcome.”

Many of the players on the U.S. team also compete in the National Women’s Hockey League, which is in its third season and currently has four teams: the Buffalo Beauts, the Boston Pride, the Connecticut Whale, and the Metropolitan Riveters (out of Newark, New Jersey). The pay there is not great, either. In 2016, the N.W.H.L. announced that it could only pay players less than half the amounts they had been promised—which ranged between ten thousand and twenty-six thousand dollars annually. For the current season, in which many Olympians are not playing, salaries range from five thousand to seven thousand dollars. Each team practices two nights per week and plays sixteen regular-season games, on the weekends; the league structures this weeknights-and-weekends schedule around the fact that many of the N.W.H.L.’s players work other jobs full time. (Lacking a lucrative television-rights deal, the N.W.H.L. streams its games for free online.) Still, the fact of a women’s professional league is itself a mark of progress, and the league’s deputy commissioner, Hayley Moore, told me that she is optimistic. “I don’t think there’s a better time for women’s hockey and fighting for equality,” she said. “There was obviously a huge spotlight shone on it, because of the boycott. We stood by those athletes and believe in the movement—we’re all a part of it. Not just women’s hockey or sports, but it’s a bigger movement.”

Meanwhile, the N.H.L., rather than pause its regular season to allow players to compete for their countries, as they have done for the past several Winter Olympics, has kept its players out of the Games. Presumably as a result of this decision, the ratings for Olympic men’s hockey have declined severely. This has created an opening for the women’s team to garner more notice than usual. The Korean women’s team, which united players from both North and South Korea, also drew attention to the women’s tournament. (One of the athletes on the Korean team, Yoojung Park, has a sister, Hannah Brandt, who is competing for the American squad; Park was adopted by Brandt’s biological parents six months before Brandt was born.) And, from a ratings perspective, a U.S.-Canada gold-medal rematch was probably the best possible outcome.

It’s now been twenty years since the U.S. women’s team won its sole Olympic gold, at the first women’s tournament, in Nagano, in 1998. “I think about this team and where we’ve come, our program, how far we’ve come in the last four years, the last eight years,” Meghan Duggan told reporters in Pyeongchang before the competition. “We’ve seen tremendous growth. We’ve seen tremendous energy, excitement, and positivity. This is a different group. This is a different team than everyone saw four years ago. I think we’ve all matured in our habits, matured in our mind-sets, and we’re ready to go.”