Before hitting the ice for Sunday's Olympic gold medal game, Charlie McAvoy was reading. Not a book, but rather letters – letters that his family members had written to him and that his wife, Kiley, had collected for McAvoy to bring to Italy with him.
McAvoy was playing for his country, of course, and his 24 USA teammates. He knew he was representing the Boston Bruins as well. But the people who wrote those letters were the ones that mattered the most.
"None of this would mean really anything, what it's meant, if I didn't have my family to share it with," McAvoy said Thursday at TD Garden.
Calendar year 2025 was not the easiest for McAvoy and his family. It started on the highest of highs for McAvoy and his wife, when their first child, son Rhys, was born on Jan. 26. By the end of the year, though, McAvoy was ready to leave 2025 in the rearview mirror.
The next month, McAvoy suffered a season-ending shoulder injury and infection at the 4 Nations Face-Off. He watched from the sidelines as the Bruins turned into sellers, dealt away a few of his closest friends, and limped to the finish line.
This season, with a trip to the Olympics in the middle of it, was a fresh start, one that McAvoy was excited about… right up until a Noah Dobson slap shot shattered his jaw during a Nov. 15 game in Montreal. At the same time McAvoy had to deal with that, his son was dealing with a health issue that required hospitalization.
It's been a lot, a reality that McAvoy and his wife acknowledged before their trip to Milan for the Olympics – a trip that came with one last injury scare the night before McAvoy left thanks to an elbow to the head from Florida Panthers forward Sandis Vilmanis.
"We had kind of talked about it leading up to this tournament, just honestly how much has gone on in our lives this year," McAvoy said Thursday at TD Garden. "A lot of it public, but a lot of it not. Kind of what we've gone through as a family this year, and we just kept being like, 'Hey, I think we deserve this. We deserve something good to happen to us.'"
McAvoy got that something good. In fact, he got the best moment of his hockey career on Sunday when he and the United States won Olympic gold with a 2-1 overtime victory against Canada.
"The McAvoys, we needed a win this year," he said.
McAvoy played a big role in that win, logging the second-most minutes on the team and making one of the biggest plays of the game when he slid behind goalie Connor Hellebuyck midway through the third period and saved a Tom Wilson shot right on the goal line.
"Probably the only thing that got past Helley that whole game," McAvoy joked.
After the initial on-ice celebration with his teammates following Jack Hughes' overtime winner, McAvoy made sure to find his family. All of his immediate family was in the arena, as were some other relatives and close friends from home. Of course, his father-in-law, Mike Sullivan, was Team USA's head coach and right in the middle of it all as well.
"I had an embrace with my dad that they got some good pictures of, but I jumped up and pulled myself up to grab him, and he's crying," McAvoy said. "Like, that's the guy that had me on the ice when I was two at the little rink in Long Beach, New York. … To have the chance to do that with them, you don't get there without it. It does take a village. Just to have that feeling of just pure pride, but like I kept telling them, 'We did it. We did it.' Because you can't do it by yourself."
Now, after several more days of celebrating with his U.S. teammates, McAvoy is finally back with his Bruins teammates as they prepare for a stretch run that features 25 games in 48 days as they try to hold on to a playoff spot. He admits there is a mental challenge to trying to reset after such an incredible high.
"It's hard," he said. "It is, honestly. It kind of feels like, I guess in a way, like a Stanley Cup, almost like the year should be over now. Mentally, I have that, and then you have to dial back in and realize that what this team has done so far this year, this position that we've put ourselves in, what we've done has been really special, too. So, there's so much left to play for this year, switching back to putting the 'B' on. I'm really excited for the second half."
McAvoy now has one of the two biggest prizes any hockey player can win: an Olympic gold. He would like to get the other, a Stanley Cup, sooner rather than later.
"I had two things in my hockey career that I wanted to accomplish, honestly," McAvoy said. "When you're a kid, you're looking at this and saying, 'If I could be an Olympian, that would be amazing.' And that was a check. And then to be an Olympic gold medalist is just a whole other level. So, I put that on par with the Stanley Cup.
"I did one, and I can say I'm a winner now. … Now I have a win there on my record. Hopefully a Stanley Cup isn't too far behind."
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