'I missed a couple to keep it close, and Kevin didn't miss much at all. It's all a matter of fractions but I was fractions wide and he wasn't.'
McMillan, one of two members of the British Olympic team with a serious chance of a medal at these Winter Games, consoled himself that he had spotted 'frailties' in the Canadian team.
He said: 'Hopefully we can pick up enough wins to play them again in the semi-finals and then exploit what we have learned.'
Ogden is as far removed from the Olympic centre of these Games as curling is from the core disciplines of downhill skiing and snowboarding. It is so ridiculed for the tactic of brushing ice to guide the stone that Hollywood is making a movie starring comic Leslie Nielsen called Men with Brooms.
A band of pipers in kilts who opened proceedings with a rendition of Scotland The Brave might have led McMillan's four to feel at home but there was soon no doubting that they were in enemy territory in this former outpost for trappers of the Hudson Bay Company.
The noise was deafening as America gave world champions Sweden a 10-5 mauling on the adjacent rink, while McMillan was preoccupied with chasing his game from the second end. Martin removed four of McMillan's stones from the house while substituting two of his own, and McMillan was never again in contention.
He was 3-0 down before he scored, and 4- 1 down at halfway. The decisive shot was on the seventh end. McMillan had three in the house but with the first of his two attempts Martin cannoned one out of play and stopped his stone closer to the bull's eye than the other two.
McMillan expected to win. He beat Martin in the 1992 Olympics when curling was a demonstration sport and again in 1997 when he won a bronze at the World Championships, and Martin has a reputation in his home city of Edmonton of choking on the big occasions.
Today McMillan faces the humiliated Swedes.
He said: 'They are in the same boat as us now but we always knew the first two would be the toughest. If we win, we will be one and one after meeting the two best which would be fine. But with eight games in the round-robin to play, we can still make it even if we lose.'
