Beijing, 1990 Asian Games, autumn 1990. In the women's table tennis competition, North Korea's Ri Bun-hui (Bae Doona) faces off against South Korea's Hyun Jung-hwa (Ha Ji-won); Bun-hui loses, but Jung-hwa is beaten by China's Deng Yaping (Kim Jae-hwa), who takes the gold. Six months later, in Busan, Jung-hwa is finishing her preparation for the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships, to be held in Chiba, Chiba; aside from caring for her father in the hospital, she is under huge local pressure to win a gold medal this time. Just prior to leaving, it is announced that, following a North-South Summit, the North and South Korean teams will compete as a single unit for the first time, under a newly designed Korean Unification Flag and with a North Korean, Jo Nam-poong (Kim Eung-soo), as its chief trainer. In Chiba, quarrels and fights break out between the two, mutually suspicious sides, exacerbated by young Northern hothead Choi Kyung-sub (Lee Jong-suk) and Southern joker Oh Doo-man (Oh Jung-se). Jung-hwa shares a room with fellow player Choi Yeon-jung (Choi Yoon-young), who fancies Kyung-sub. Bun-hui rooms with Yu Sun-bok (Han Ye-ri) who suffers badly from competition nerves. During the trials for the women's team, Sun-bok performs poorly and steps down in favor of Jung-hwa for the good of the team. Now paired together, Jung-hwa and Bun-hui settle their differences as the players finally start to bond. As they train for 46 days, game-by-game, the two find a budding friendship. But as the finals versus the Chinese team looms, the Koreans' unity is threatened from another direction. When political winds change again and just as suddenly an announcement is made to disband team Korea, the two young women must prove to their people and the world that teamwork can outshine the dark shadows of a painful history.