from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,

Separate and unequal.

It may be only now that the U.S. National Women’s Hockey Team’s righteous fight for equal opportunity has become part of the public’s consciousness, but the struggle to rectify these anachronistic conditions has been ongoing for a generation.

“I can’t say that I’m aware of the specific details of the talks here or of the timeline, but I know enough to say that they have been trying to settle this for a while before it became public,” the great Cammi Granato, a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, the International Hockey Hall of Fame and the captain of the Yanks’ 1998 Olympic Gold Medal-winning team, told Slap Shots on Friday. “And this certainly isn’t something that’s new.

“The year leading up to the 2002 Olympics [at Salt Lake City], our group tried to sit down with [USA Hockey] about these same issues. We had no luck. During that time we had a summit with our soccer team, they had also won a gold, we spent a lot of time with each other, we really bonded and we were interested in the same issues.”

That soccer team, of course, became known as the “ ’99ers” — the women featuring Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and Julie Foudy who captured the country’s imagination and the World Cup while playing in front of nearly 79,000 fans at Giants Stadium and almost 100,000 at the Rose Bowl in the tournament that changed the course of women’s soccer in the United States.

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