Russell still speaks about them with the same mix of pride and disbelief.

“You think of moments that people were part of,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who were part of those moments that aren’t on the team anymore. You just think of happy moments or sad moments, but those moments will never leave me.”

For Great Britain, those moments still shape who they are.

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Spend enough time around this team, even through Russell’s words, and it becomes clear this is less a roster than a continuum.

Players do not just pass through. They grow up in it.

Russell has coached many of them since they were teenagers. He talks about them as people he has known for at least a decade. That connection shows up in the way he discusses loss and progress, memory and expectation.

It also shapes how the program views its present.

“Realistically, it’s probably 32 players… maybe 35,” he said of the available pool.

That is the entire realistic selection base for a country trying to compete against nations that can draw from hundreds of elite professionals. It is a program built on commitment more than compensation. No one on the national team is paid. Players and staff step away from their club seasons and regular lives to be here.

It explains why roster transitions are delicate, why veterans are kept as long as possible and why Dowd and Davies from that historic 2019 win against France are still on the team seven years later. 

And why development, or the lack of it, looms over every conversation.

“I don’t see a lot of development,” Russell admitted. “We need more.”

There are efforts underway to rebuild that pipeline, but even in his most optimistic framing, the timeline stretches years into the future.

That does not help in Zurich.

—-

Against teams like the United States or Finland, the gap shows up immediately in pace, depth and the way the ice tilts. It shows up on the shot counter.

Russell neither pretends otherwise nor tries to reinvent his team for those matchups.

“The one thing we’ve never tried to do is get away from what got us there,” he said.

That means structure, discipline, work ethic and goaltending.

For years, the backbone of British resistance has been Ben Bowns, a 35-year-old from Cardiff in the UK-based Elite Ice Hockey League accustomed to heavy workloads and long nights.