MILAN — The buildup to the goal, Connor McDavid said, started a year ago at the 4 Nations Face-Off.

That was when he, Nathan MacKinnon, Sidney Crosby, Sam Reinhart and Cale Makar were first put together as Canada’s top power-play unit.

That was when they started talking, beginning the process of understanding who could be where and how to find each other.

“We’ve worked on this power play a lot,” McDavid said. “Something we talk about a lot. We do it for these big moments. And just found a way to score a big one in a big moment.”

Oh, yes they did.

Team Canada trailed Finland 2-0 in the second, 2-1 in the third and stared down a second straight overtime with a berth in the gold medal game on the line Friday afternoon.

Then they made sure the game didn’t make it that far.

Instead, the Cardiac Canadians struck in the form of a McDavid to MacKinnon power-play goal with 35.2 seconds to go, rescuing a heart-stopper of a game in the form of a 3-2 win, Canada over Finland, setting up a heavyweight showdown against the United States in the final.

They did it without Crosby, their captain and their leader in every sense of the word, who tried everything possible to play through a lower-body injury sustained in the quarterfinal against Czechia.

They weren’t told his status until they arrived at the rink, and without him, they trailed for a second straight game, one that crescendoed like an opera a few miles away at La Scala.

Even after Reinhart’s power-play tip-in had cut a 2-0 deficit in half 14:20 into the second, Finland looked uniquely poised to hold a lead.

Defensive hockey is part of the spine of Finland’s hockey identity.

They played Friday with superb structure, keeping Canada out of the middle of the ice and forcing some of the best players in the world to play sped up and harried, settling for one-and-done looks from the perimeter.

The shell into which Finland retreated in the third period, though, would have been a lot for anyone.

You would have been forgiven, at points, for not knowing when a Finnish stick had last touched the puck. Across the last two periods, Finland had just nine shots on goal.

So it was not altogether a shock at 10:34 of the period when Shea Theodore’s one-timer went through a wicker-basket of traffic to beat Juuse Saros, tie the game at two and prompt a scarlet-clad group hug with Theodore in the middle.

Though it appeared on the border of goaltender interference, Finland opted not to challenge.

“I think we knew it in the dressing room,” Bo Horvat said. “We knew, we could feel it coming. It was just a matter of time. We never stopped believing in ourselves and in our game.”

The tie game didn’t mean any letup in Canada’s pressure, and with 2:35 left in regulation, MacKinnon — whose Mach 3 line with McDavid and Macklin Celebrini threatened all night — drew a high stick on Niko Mikkola.

And with two seconds to go on that power play, and 35.2 seconds to go in the game, MacKinnon wired in a one-timer from the left circle off McDavid’s feed to blow the roof off a scarlet-drenched Santagiulia Arena and send Canada to the gold medal game.

Finland challenged the zone entry for offside, but review confirmed that Celebrini was onside, if only by the length of his skate blade.

“We played like Team Canada can,” said Tom Wilson, a human wrecking ball all night on a newly formed havoc line alongside Brad Marchand and Sam Bennett. “They couldn’t hang on.”

Finland pulled into the lead on Mikko Rantanen’s power-play one-timer in the first period, and doubled it in shocking fashion on a shorthand Erik Haula breakaway early in the second.

For all Canada’s wealth of talent, it marked a second straight game in which they’ve been on the precipice of elimination at these Olympics.

“It’s best-on-best,” McDavid said. “The best teams in the world going at it with the best players in the world, all playing for something very, very meaningful. And you’re seeing that. This is what we’ve been missing, isn’t it?

“It’s been great hockey. The quarters, three of them go to overtime and you’re one shot away in all those games from having a Czechia, Slovakia, Swiss quarterfinal. Hockey is a great sport with so many countries and players and you’re seeing that in this tournament.”

It is Canada, though, the Cardiac Canadians and the world’s hockey superpower, that still stands on the mountaintop.

On Sunday, they’ll play for the right to stay there another four years.