Mike Eruzione hasn’t seen either of the movies about the “Miracle On Ice” in 10 years.

“I know the story,” he said, smiling.

Only three times in 40 years has he allowed himself to watch the replay of the U.S. ice hockey team’s upset of the Soviets in Lake Placid Olympics.

“The second time was about a year ago,” said Eruzione, who scored the decisive goal in the Americans’ 4-3 victory Feb. 22, 1980.

“I don’t want to be sitting at home watching the Russian game and one of my buddies shows up and says, ‘Let it go, Mike.’ ”

But the game, the team he captained to Olympic gold and the memories remain a huge part of his life. At the age of 65, he concedes this much unapologetically, “I’d like to watch it someday when my grandkids get a little older.”

Eruzione was in town Tuesday to join Craig Patrick, a former Pittsburgh Penguins general manager and an assistant to coach Herb Brooks on the U.S. team, at PPG Paints Arena, where they dropped the puck in a ceremony before the game against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Eruzione said he makes between 25 and 30 speeches every year, many of them to corporations seeking motivation for their salespeople.

He has been to Switzerland, Morocco and London. He will do a conference call Thursday with veteran play-by-play announcer Al Michaels, who dropped the iconic question, “Do you believe in miracles?” as the game ended.

Then, it’s off to Florida, Dallas, Los Angeles, Minnesota and Las Vegas twice in the next month.

“My schedule is a little crazy,” he said. “I keep telling my wife maybe this will be the last year, but it keeps continuing.”

During the Olympics, Eruzione said he and his teammates did not realize the importance of the game. Brooks mostly shielded them from the media.

“To us, it was a hockey game. To a lot of people, it was a hockey game,” he said.

“But to a lot more people, it was the political climate that made this event so special. The (Iran) hostages, the state of our country, threat of a cold war, gas lines, inflation.

“As a country, we were looking to feel good about something. It happened to be us. Of all sports, ice hockey. Hockey wasn’t the biggest sport in the United States and still isn’t, unfortunately. But this moment captured the spirit of a country.”

Brooks, who coached the Penguins under Patrick during the 1999-2000 season, brought together fierce rivals from Boston University (Eruzione’s school) and the University of Minnesota. The schools had staged an infamous bench-clearing brawl during the 1976 NCAA Tournament that took officials 30 minutes to resolve.

“I didn’t like anyone from Minnesota,” Eruzione said.

But they bonded under the U.S. flag, he said.

Minnesota, coached by Brooks, and Wisconsin had an equally intense rivalry.

“Herb Brooks and Badger Bob Johnson did not like each other at all,” Eruzione said of the schools’ coaches. “Here was our best player, Mark Johnson, Badger’s son, playing for Herb.

“How was that going to work? And it worked out fine because Mark is not only a great player, he’s a great person and Herb’s a great coach.”

After the Olympics, hockey mostly ended for Eruzione, but he did play in a league with some buddies until age 50.

He said he sold most of his memorabilia for $1.3 million, giving the money to his children and using part of it to endow a scholarship at BU in his parents’ name.

The gold medal is kept in a safe deposit box at a bank. He let it out recently so his 6-year-old grandson, Michael, could take it school for show and tell.

“The medal is one thing that will never be sold while I’m alive,” he said. “But if I die tomorrow, my 31-year-old son, he’ll sell it. It will be on eBay in a heartbeat.”

Eruzione wrote a book about his life titled “The Making of a Miracle: The Untold Story of the Captain of the 1980 Gold Medal-Winning U.S. Olympic Hockey Team.”

“I wrote the book for one reason and one reason only,” he said. “I want my grandkids to know my life wasn’t two weeks in Lake Placid. I want them to know Papa did a lot more things in his life than one game and one goal.”

Eruzione said he and his teammates didn’t realize the impact they made until after their return home. But the ensuing years have made clear what their victory meant to the nation.

“We were working-class kids who came from families that taught great values about teamwork, great values about hard work to be successful,” he said.

“The lessons our team learned as we were playing, believing in yourself, believing in each other, becoming a great team together as a group — Herb used to call us the lunch-pail, hard-hat group of guys.

“We came to work every day prepared and focused to be the best. It turned out that we were.”

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