Team USA celebration continues with White House visit, “Today Show” appearances

The Team USA party continued on Tuesday, the first full day the champions were back on home soil after winning men’s hockey gold at the Winter Olympic Games Milano Cortina 2026.

The players understandably have been greeted as heroes after Jack Hughes’ overtime goal gave them an historic 2-1 victory against rival Canada in the championship game at the Olympics on Sunday. It was the first time USA won an Olympic gold medal in men’s hockey since the "Miracle on Ice" team accomplished the feat at the 1980 Lake Placid Games some 46 years earlier.

After arriving in Miami from Milan Monday, the party extended into the wee hours of Tuesday. 

Hughes and his brother Quinn were up early Tuesday for a segment on the NBC’s “The Today Show.” The appearance came before the Hughes’s joined most of their teammates on a charter flight for Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump. 

Ellen Hughes, Jack and Quinn’s mother, also appeared on “The Today Show” in her own segment after she served as a consultant with the U.S. women's team, which also won gold, defeating Canada in overtime on Thursday. 

"These players, both the men and women, can bring so much unity to a group and to a country,” she said. “People that cheered on that don’t watch hockey, people that have politics on one side or on the other side, and that’s all both the men’s team and the women’s team care about.

“If you could see what we see from the inside, and the men and women sharing, you know, dorm rooms and halls and flex floors and the camaraderie and the synergy and the way the women cheered on the men and the way the men cheered on the women - that’s what it’s all about.”

Jack Hughes said the men's and women's teams ended up celebrating together in the cafeteria in Milan until 3:30 a.m. after the men’s victory. Such is the mutual respect between the teams.

“If there was a camera on me and Quinn when the women's team won, we look like the biggest superfans of all time,” Jack said. “We were just jumping up and down. We couldn’t believe it.”

An entire country of fans had the same reaction when Jack scored on Sunday.

“We felt so much support from all of our friends and family, so many people involved in USA Hockey and so many people across the country,” Jack said. “We’re so proud that we won the gold medal, and we're so proud we did it for so many people that got us to this point.”

As for the White House visit, Jack, his voice understandably hoarse after 48 hours of raw celebration, said that it’s “something you don't get to do ... every Tuesday.”

This, however, was no ordinary Tuesday.

Or ordinary team.

And for the Hughes brothers, it was sweet revenge. 

In 2010, a time when their father Jim was working with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Jack, Quinn and youngest brother Luke gathered with dozens of other kids to watch the gold medal game in a restaurant at CWENCH Centre, a multi-pad arena complex near Toronto’s Pearson International Airport that was one of the home bases for the Toronto Marlboros of the Metropolitan Toronto Hockey League, the organization the Hughes boys played for.

They were the lone Team USA fans in a room that joyfully exploded with cheers when Sidney Crosby scored the Golden Goal for Team Canada in a 3-2 overtime win against Team USA at the Vancouver Games.

Now, here were Jack and Quinn Tuesday, 16 years later, at the White House, having turned devastation into jubilation with Jack’s own golden goal against Team Canada and Crosby, who missed the game with a lower-body injury. 

Team USA’s charter from Florida landed at Andrews Air Force Base at about 1:20 p.m. ET Tuesday. After deplaning, many of the players went over to a nearby fence to shake hands with a gathering of fans who were waiting to greet hockey’s newest heroes.

According to social media posts from Margo Martin, Special Assistant to the President and Communications Advisor, the players arrived at the White House about an hour later where they posed on the south lawn with their gold medals around their necks. That was followed by an exploration of the White House colonnade, a tour that took place to the accompaniment of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s iconic tune “Free Bird.”

By about 4 p.m. ET, Team USA captain Auston Matthews led the players into the Oval Office, where President Trump shook their hands and posed for a photo with the group.

Players were then offered to stay for the President's State of the Union address Tuesday evening.