Deja Vu all Over Again

Photo by Bruce Ben­nett from Canada.com

We real­ized shortly after we arrived in Canada that one of the keys to under­stand­ing Cana­dian cul­ture is to fol­low and appre­ci­ate the sport — no, it’s greater than merely a sport, the Cul­ture of Hockey. Hockey was invented in Canada, and ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ is prob­a­bly the high­est rated TV show in the coun­try. I’ll bet it has been since it first aired. Typ­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion at work in the morn­ing is about last night’s game (although for a lot of the younger pro­gram­mers, these days they’ve been talk­ing about UFC — Ulti­mate Fight­ing Championship).

What was the best way to become a par­tic­i­pant in this essence of Canada? I’m too old to learn to play the game and it is extremely demand­ing ath­let­i­cally. So, being well-informed fans will have to suf­fice. The best place to start becom­ing a real fan is to par­tic­i­pate in the biggest games of the year: the Stan­ley Cup Play­offs — that’s the final cham­pi­onship where the win­ners of the year face off. Since Hockey is so big in Canada, it takes up nearly half of the year to get to that point. While the tem­per­a­ture out­side is balmy, and we’re see­ing mar­velously long days end­ing sun­set between 9 and 9:30, they are still fight­ing it out on the rink. March may be the month of mad­ness for Col­lege Bas­ket­ball, and late January/early Feb­ru­ary may be the time for the Super Bowl, but June is the biggest month for Hockey’s final 7 games. This year it’s par­tic­u­larly good to get ini­ti­ated into root­ing for Hockey in Canada, because the final 2 teams are the South Car­olina Hur­ri­canes ver­sus the Edmon­ton Oil­ers. We get to root for Hockey and Canada! (It’s no stretch for us any­way. Hail­ing solidly from the North­east, we were never big fans of the Car­oli­nas. I know there are plenty of fine peo­ple in South Car­olina, and some beau­ti­ful stretches of coast­line, but I must con­fess that I always asso­ci­ated the state with mon­strous indus­trial hog farms, Jesse Helms — and I know, he was from North Car­olina — OK, Strom Thur­mond, and Big Tobacco.)

The first game of the Stan­ley Cup was last night. We did it right, drink­ing beer and watch­ing from begin­ning to end. I have to admit, the game felt some­what famil­iar, at least emo­tion­ally. Let’s see, it started out well, with an early lead, that reached 3 to 0. But the other team fought their way back, and tied the score. In the final min­utes, the Hur­ri­canes not only won the game, but a key player for Edmon­ton, goalie Dwayne Rolo­son was injured and will prob­a­bly be side­lined for the remain­der of the play­offs. In short, it had all the ele­ments of a Boston Red Sox game: Early con­fi­dence, a mid-game crum­ble, a dev­as­tat­ing injury, and final ignominy. Gee, we feel per­fectly at home, at least in terms of the arc of our sports team. Hockey, base­ball, it’s not how you play the game, it’s how you lose, and we had nearly 15 years of learn­ing how to lose in Boston. I only hope that we don’t go 15 years here with­out any team in Canada win­ning the Stan­ley Cup.