PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—They didn’t go to the bathroom. They didn’t check their phones, because they didn’t have phones. They didn’t look around in wonder, the way you typically would if you had been dropped into what was essentially an alien world, because that was not how they were trained. The North Korean cheerleaders were, presumably, not trained to gawk.

Hockey was politics at the Pyeongchang Olympics on Saturday night, as the Korean hockey team — the personification of the unified team, with three players in the lineup from North Korea — lost to the Swiss 8-0. They didn’t have a chance: the Swiss were bigger, faster, better. The shots were 52-8.

But they were only the excuse for the bigger tableau. South Korean president Moon Jae-in and Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, sat in the stands, separated by IOC president Thomas Bach. In front of them sat one cadre of the 200 North Korean cheerleaders scattered around the hockey rink. South Korea was winning its first gold medal of the Olympics at short-track speedskating, but the biggest players were here.

“It’s bigger than sports, right?” said Yoo Jee-Ho, a sports reporter for Yonhap, the South Korean new agency. “It really is. It’s bigger than a hockey game.”

Earlier in the day, Kim Yo Jong invited Moon to what would, if it actually happened, be just the third inter-Korean summit, after attempts in 2000 and 2007. She presented Moon with a blue folder with such practised formality — and her trademark supercilious Mona Lisa smile — that local TV replayed it like it was the Zapruder film. The opening ceremony Friday night featured the unified team marching in, and two of the players from this hockey team climbing steps in unison with the Olympic flame.

Whether it means anything, nobody should guess. But on this night, it was a mingling of the countries in a way nobody had ever seen. The cheerleaders sat in their near-Canadian red plus blue — flanked by black-jacketed security going head counts when groups went to the bathroom — wearing what looked like knockoff Adidas sneakers. And yes, they cheered. Their first attempt drew a great cheer from the crowd; they continued, on and off, all night.

They were off-key sometimes: Bruno Mars singing “Uptown Funk” was playing over the sound system, and they would be singing one of their various songs. They chanted “Cheer up!” “Be Strong!” “Win, Win!” “Unification, Unification!” “We Are Together! We Are One!” They brought out traditional dancers in front of the squads, and their more modern blue-and-white funk-style dancers, who wouldn’t be too out of place in a club.

And it was a jarring contrast, as befits trained cheerleaders from one of the world’s most repressive, isolated regimes, and a hyper-modern technology superpower. They rigorously chanted “We Are One” in the middle of a crowd of South Koreans who stared, took pictures, dressed how they wanted and cheered when they wanted, and waved more traditional Korean flags than the blue unified version the cheerleaders held.

“They seem like they practise this a lot,” said Jong Kim, a 22-year-old university student sitting near one of the teams. “It’s like they’re robots. But I’m with them, also. Not that I’m with the government, but I’m with the joint team. Their people — they’ve done nothing wrong. The players — they want to play a good game and do well. So I’m rooting for that, aside from politics.”

Jong said a lot of young people wonder whether unification would even be a good idea. The burden of modernizing a country so different, so locked in a different time, weighs on them. But she believes it is a worthy goal. Ask a young South Korean what they want, assuming that North Korea would never give up its nuclear weapons without a war, and they think for a second.

“It’s a big question, right?” said Yoo. “I guess, a sustained period of peace. I mean, short of giving up their nuclear weapons, a sustained period of peace.”

“Maybe we’ll have more co-operation,” said Jong. “I’d like to see that. It’s something. It’s better than war. We have a split government, and it’s a tragedy. I don’t want war. I want unification, peacefully.”

The dignitaries appeared on the bench after the game, after the arena had largely emptied out, and Bach, Moon, and titular North Korean head of state Kim Yong Nam spoke to the players, telling them to keep their chins up, that they were part of something bigger. The cheerleaders had not left their seats, and sang another singsong tune into the relative quiet. Finally, the players left the ice.

They talked about how it has been hard: adding players so late, the difficult translations of hockey terms, having to tell South Koreans they would not play in favour of North Koreans, having to tell a North Korean who was in a roster spot because of an injury she would not play this historic game. They are trying.

“We just try to give the players a ton of credit,” said Sarah Murray, the Korean head coach with Canadian and American citizenships. “‘It’s because of you guys that the chemistry is good. It’s because of you that our team is working. Not because some political told you it had to happen.’ Our players are the ones that are making this work.”

“I think that the North Koreans are improving dramatically. They just want to learn, they want to get better, and they work extremely hard. The chemistry on the team is better than I could have ever predicted. They laugh together, they hang out together, they eat meals together, chemistry’s really good.

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“I’ll walk into the locker room and they’re all laughing together, and you cannot tell who’s from the North, who’s from the South. They’re just girls playing hockey.”

They are that. But they are something more right now, too.

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