Lol. With the costs of rinks and ice time and schools having limited budgets this is not going to happen. It is a niche sport and always will be. 1980 was a much bigger accomplishment and should have resulted more popularity but that never happened. Just enjoy it for what it is.
when you're starting with a sport that's only easily accessible in under half the country and expectations/demand is that you play year round, hockey is definitely going to be stuck in being the 4th-5th sport in the US (football, basketball, baseball and then consideration for soccer). it's fun, a bunch of people care for a brief glimmer in time, and then it will go back to where it is for people playing.
It may help transiently boost NHL ratings and Stanley Cup ratings and kids when they grow up will say it meant a lot to them, but no it's not going to be what moves the needle on someone deciding to put their kid in hockey because they saw a kid from a hockey dynamo family score a game winning goal to beat a Canadian team that there's really no outside hockey motivation for this story as much as they wanted to pump stuff about Miracle all Olympics long in our face
These 2 sets have been equal awhile in best on best. Canada's WJC teams have been mediocre for the last 3 years after being dominant in the mid 2000s (since 2010, Canada has 5, US has 5, everyone else 6).
This was a win for what USA Hockey has been for the last several decades in building pipelines and they happened to have a set of guys hit at the right time. They split with Canada in 2010 (best on best), were their equals in Sochi in 2014 but lost 1-0. The short is, bout fuckin time we beat them when it matters lol. Been a long time coming that they've been equals on the national stage, there's just been so few opportunities to actually have a best on best game (I don't think Crosby changes anything other than they maybe score on the PP, they dramatically outplayed us as it was).