PUCK FLICK.(The Talk of the Town)

Few things rate higher on the dork meter than going to see "Miracle" with a hockey stick in your hands. "Miracle," of course, is the new movie about the United States hockey team's upset of the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, in Lake Placid. Though it may be routine, at a movie like this, to get choked up or even to cheer, it is not advisable to show up wearing or carrying hockey equipment of any kind. One man who tried this the other night, at a theatre on East Eighty-sixth Street--he couldn't help stickhandling kernels of spilled popcorn in the aisle--attracted a range of withering, befuddled glances. For his wife, the embarrassment abated only when the show began. "This is a date?" she whispered.

A few weeks ago, Igor Larionov, the New Jersey Devil and former Soviet star, who has been called the Russian Gretzky, decided that he needed to see the film. He went to a multiplex near his house, in Short Hills, with his wife and his young son, but they wanted to see something else. "So I went by myself," Larionov said the other day, in the Devils' locker room after practice. "I think I was the last guy to come into the theatre. The place was full. It was already dark." Nobody in the theatre seemed to recognize him, in part because he is just a hockey player, and also because he hardly looks like a professional athlete: he is short and compact, with a thoughtful, boyish expression that, along with a proficiency at chess and an occasional quoting of Pushkin and the wire-rimmed glasses that he wears away from the rink, has earned him another nickname--the Professor. He was among the first Russians to come to play in the National Hockey League, fourteen years ago. Now, at forty-three, he's the oldest player in the N.H.L.

In 1980, Larionov was a little too green to play on the Soviet team at Lake Placid, but he remembers the occasion well. "The guys who didn't make the national team, we were in Kiev at a tournament, to try to stay busy," he said. "I found out in the morning. I was shocked. Somebody said, at breakfast, 'The Russians lost last night.' I guess the Voice of America said it. I thought, There's no chance anybody could ...