Do Canadians take umbrage to the fact that the country is so closely related to hockey?
Should they? No, we don’t. You are talking about the only country to host an Olympic Games and not win a Gold Medal. (We’ve done that twice – Montreal 1976 & Calgary 1988.) When it comes to best-on-best hockey, we take a ton of pride in being number one. People of a certain age in this country – not me, I was 2 – know exactly where they were when Paul Henderson scored with 34 seconds left to beat Russia 6-5 in Game 8 of the 1972 Summit Series. (Team Canada won 4-3-1.) Everybody remembers where they were, what they were doing. Hockey is now covered in-depth 12 months a year, just like the NFL in the U.S. It’s crazy, but fans want it. Playing hockey in a Canadian city is suffocating. When Canada lost 5-2 to Sweden in the opening game of the 2002 Olympic hockey tournament, one sports radio station did 10 straight hours of phone calls. I call that insane, but there’s a demand for it. When Canada beat the United States for the Gold, there were estimated to be more than 10 million viewers. N
