But in the men’s competition, the Russian squad — formally competing as the Russian Olympic Committee as a penalty for the country’s history of doping — was a pretournament favorite, if an imperfect one.
The Russians nearly lost their first game in Beijing, a meeting with the Swiss. They later beat Denmark, which was making its inaugural Olympic appearance in men’s hockey, by two goals. The Czech Republic’s team outlasted the Russians, 6-5, to finish the preliminary round.
They still earned a spot in the quarterfinal round, where they beat Denmark again, and then survived a semifinal against Sweden on Friday night, when it took a 17-shot shootout to decide a winner.
The Finns had a somewhat smoother route to Sunday’s meeting: They pummeled Slovakia in the preliminary round, where they also beat Latvia and edged Sweden, and eviscerated Switzerland in a quarterfinal. They more narrowly beat the Slovak team in the semifinal but advanced with far less of a fight than their Russian counterparts.
But it was the Russians who scored first on Sunday. Mikhail Grigorenko, a forward who was on Russia’s gold medal-winning team in 2018 and previously played in the N.H.L., sliced a shot toward the net, where, with almost 13 minutes to play in the first, it streaked past Finland’s Harri Sateri.
The Finns tied the game early in the second, when Ville Pokka, a Finnish defenseman, took a shot from the rink’s edge, right in front of his own bench and just yards ahead of the blue line. The puck zipped past a Finn, a Russian and Ivan Fedotov, the 25-year-old netminder who was born in Finland but reared in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Fedotov opened the third period with more misery: Just 31 seconds in, Hannes Bjorninen redeemed an earlier penalty box stint by taking a straight-on shot at the Russian net.