Really?
You don't remember the tenor of the American political and social climate through the 1970s and into 1980?
Watergate, inflation, screamingly high interest rates, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Russian invasion of Afghanistan, oil embargos, the list of why the 1970s sucked amazing amounts of ass goes on and on. And don't forget Jimmy Carter, lines for free government cheese, generic products in those black and white boxes, the collapse of any number of American industries...
I was a kid in the 1970s and I recognized just how badly things sucked morale wise in this country, just how badly battered the American psyche was.
And through it all was an increasingly strident undercurrent of "The USA is finished as an economic and international influencer/power! The Soviets are ascending, the US is in decline, and that will never change!" There was a feature article in Time Magazine around this time explaining that in excruciating detail, IIRC by one of Time's resident communists.
As a geo-political statement the USA vs Russia hockey match was a non factor, but it gave people something feel good to latch on to coming out of decade in which the best news was typically "nothing too terrible happened today."