As many expected, the return of NHL players to the Olympics lived up to the hype and then some. Tight games, tons of action and skill that you can only dream of seeing on the same ice sheet once every four years, if you’re lucky.

So whose decision was it to make the biggest game of the tournament end with a gimmick?

“I don’t love it,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said a few hours after the United States defeated Canada to take home gold in Milan.

What he doesn’t love is 3-on-3 hockey being what it all came down to on Sunday in the gold medal game. Nor should he. During the round-robin portion of the tournament, there were close games, but only one managed to last beyond regulation. That game ended in 3-on-3, and no one really cared because at that point, everyone was playing for seeding.

Once you get beyond the round-robin portion of any tournament and into the do-or-die games, it should never end that way. And how it ever got to that point is beyond me.

You wouldn’t decide the Stanley Cup Final with a gimmick, so why are we ending a best-on-best tournament with one?

“I feel like once it gets to the playoffs, I don’t think (3-on-3) should be the case,” Martin Necas said after his first post-Olympics practice on Sunday. “You battle so hard and you wait for so long, maybe it should be decided 5-on-5, golden goal.”

Necas acknowledged that at certain points in the tournament, particularly the quarterfinals, it would be very difficult to have any sort of continuous overtime play as they do in the NHL playoffs because of logistical matters. Games have to start at a certain time at the same arena, so you can’t just have games going on and on all day. It just wouldn’t work.

When you get down to the gold medal game or even just the semifinals, there has to be a better way than 3-on-3, though.

“I would have liked to see 5-on-5,” Scott Wedgewood said. “3-on-3 is what it is; you have it in the regular season. I just think you picture that as a best-on-best, 5-on-5 is how the game of hockey’s played. I would have liked to see a little more of the playoff format of go until it’s over with that overtime.”

The 2010 Olympics were decided in overtime during 4-on-4 hockey. While that’s not 5-on-5 by any means, it’s a lot better than 3-on-3, where a lot of players on those teams would have never touched the ice.

“As a hockey player, I just think it’s a little gimmicky. Especially as a goalie, I hate it,” Wedgewood said. “They battle so hard, you play 60 minutes and it gets into a little bit of the mini game instead of how we play in the playoffs.”

Both teams in the gold medal matchup knew the rules, and the United States deserves full credit for getting the job done when it mattered the most. No one is taking Jack Hughes’ goal away, nor should they, and Canada can’t make excuses given the amount of talent they can throw on the ice in a situation like that.

But four years from now, there’s no way we should be seeing a gold medal game end like that.

Got it, IOC?