With all that’s going on in the world, it may have slipped your notice that the Winter Olympics will be held in Italy starting in February.

The Winter Olympics produced one of the childhood memories that I recall most vividly.

It became known as the “Miracle on Ice.”

The short version is that the U.S. men’s hockey team in 1980 beat the seemingly unbeatable Soviet team on its way to Olympic gold in Lake Placid, New York.

Of course it’s the details that made it a huge, national event still remembered today.

In the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was enemy No. 1, so every sporting event between the two countries was dramatic in ways we rarely see anymore.

The Olympics were much different as well — the games still featured amateurs. The problem for most countries was that the USSR defined that term very loosely, which is why they (and East Germany) dominated much of international sport.

The Soviet hockey team exemplified that dominance. They had won four consecutive Olympic golds (without a single loss) and were expected to breeze through the competition in 1980 as well. In exhibitions, the Russian team regularly dominated even the professional teams of the NHL.

The 1980 U.S. team was made up of mostly college players from the Midwest with an average age of 22. No one really expected the U.S. team to be more than maybe competitive in a few games.

But they kept winning, and on Feb. 22, 1980, faced the unbeaten Soviet team in the semi-finals — the same Russian team that had beaten the Americans 10-3 in a pre-Olympic exhibition.

I remember the intense build up to the game and then joining tens of millions of Americans in watching it on TV. The hope was that maybe the U.S. team would keep it somewhat close.

Of course the reason books, movies, documentaries, etc. are still being produced about the game is that the U.S. won 4-3. Many people have tried to put the victory in context: I would say it was like a team of college baseball players from Norway beating the LA Dodgers.

The U.S. team went on to beat Finland days later to win an improbable gold medal.

With the Olympics now accepting professional athletes, such moments are perhaps forever in the past. But at least we will always have that memory of how a group of scrappy, hard-working athletes who believed shocked the world and showed that miracles can happen.

—Wes Swietek is the Daily News managing editor and can be reached at wes.swietek@bgdailynews.com.