My Wild Imagination
American Inferiority Complex
The Canadian Hockey Complex

I love hockey. I'm capable of spending hours a week (if I can find the time, or if I just want to relax, or whatever) following my favorite sport. World Juniors. Prospects. KHL. And, of course, reading everything and anything about my favorite and hometown team, the Penguins. But, let me admit this: before the start of tonight's Canada-Norway match-up, I had no idea what the name of the Norwegian goaltender was. Seriously. It just wasn't a piece of information I had bothered to acquire. I look at a Canada-Norway match-up and assume "easy win for Canada".

And then comes the first period. And, though Canada is outshooting Norway and the Norwegians are taking penalties, and penalties galore (for those who don't follow hockey closely, this is typically a recipe for later disaster), my mind starts to dance as only the mind of a non-Canadian hockey fan can dance.

How much fun would it be to see.....oh, how fun, how spiteful would it be to see:

• The heavily favored Canadians failing to win their first game on home soil
• The Canadian media and fans freaking and flipping out (and that's an understatement); widespread worry and panic; a complete loss of all perspective--and all over 1 "little" loss that could cause a day of mourning in Canada
  
• A totally unknown goaltender, a team with very few NHL players, shutting down the home team, the team favored to win gold

Yeah, I'm a hockey fan. I'm a fan of the Penguins, a fan of Sidney Crosby and of several other players on the Canadian team. And still, I'm having these--um, perhaps the best terms are "malicious" and "evil"--thoughts in regards to an epic 1st game collapse by the Canadians?

Why do I have those thoughts?

Because, you see, there's this way Canada is with hockey. And it's something that's always rubbed me the wrong way. The idea that hockey is always, and only, Canada's game. If you want to get a little grasp of this concept, watch Coach's Corner with Don Cherry, and if you listen to "Grapes," (primarily an excellent entertainer who grabs attention due to how well he pushes buttons), you'll get this sense of entitlement Canadians have with their favorite sport.

And, in some sense, that "entitlement" comes from the fact that hockey is woven into the very fabric of Canadian life. Hockey Night In Canada, and Coach's Corner, is simply a staple of Saturday nights across that nation. Kids grow up playing hockey. Hockey is "their" game.

Yet let me be honest. I grew up watching hockey. And I grew up, blessedly enough, with absolutely no personal memory of the geopolitical context of the Cold War. I grew up watching, and thinking it completely normal, that English Canadians and French Canadians, Americans, Swedes, and, oh yes, Russians and Czechs, could all play on the same team and work to achieve the same goal. I grew up rooting for Mario Lemieux and Paul Coffey, Joe Mullen and Ulf Samuelsson, and Jaromir Jagr. As an adolescent, I'd come to root for Aleksey Morozov, Sergei Zubov, Petr Nedved, Darius Kasparaitis, and, in adult life, it remains perfectly natural to cheer for a Pittsburgh team comprised of players hailing from Quebec and Ontario, the Ukraine and the U.S., and of course, Russia.

So, why, then, do I have an "attitude" toward Canada? A desire, however latent, to knock the place from where the majority of NHL talent--and the distinct majority of the 2009 Cup champions--hails? What's with my fantasy? Why, in spite of the fact that I want to see Crosby succeed, is there a part of me that simply wants Canada to be knocked, so to speak, off its pedestal as "rulers of the hockey world"?

Simply put: I resent the implication that hockey is solely, only, and purely Canada's game. The great hockey teams I watched as a child taught me otherwise. Taught me that the best players come from all the over the world, that where you grew up was moot point, that what most mattered were simply the twin things of how hard you worked and how well you could play.

And, yet, having learned those great lessons from the sport of ice hockey, it's true I have an "inferiority" complex. Because, you see, the game that taught me those lessons, it's not ingrained into the fabric of my culture. It's not what naturally unites my country every Saturday night. Lessons about hard work and fair play and sacrifice come from disparate places in my nation, not from the lessons learned from a sport woven into the very fabric of a strong and free nation's life.

So, you see, I suppose there's a part of me that resents and fears the idea that hockey isn't "my" game, too, just as much as it is Canada's game. Because, though it's "just" a sport, where else in the world do you see totally different people, from totally different cultures, able to work together to achieve a goal? In what other sport, honestly and truly, will you ever see, as frequently as you do in a typical hockey game, a teammate quickly rendering the mistake of another teammate (bad pass, giveaway, etc.) moot point? Where else do you get to see what I daydreamed--insanely--that I could see in the first period? Where a team, united, where a goaltender, standing on his head, where players, playing above themselves, could have a real shot at winning a match-up no one gave them a chance to win? Where do I get to see such ideas regularly reflected in politics, in business, in the rest of life?

I know where I've always had the chance to see the dream reflected. In my favorite sport. In the sport that Canada claims as their own.

Call my thoughts about dreaming of a "shock" to Canada evil; call them petulant--and you'd be right. Alas, the Canadians have now done what they were supposed to do, what I expected them to do when I didn't bother to learn the name of Norway's goaltender, and Team Canada is now beating Team Norway by a substantial margin.

But I'm going to let those daydreamed thoughts stand. Because, as watching Olympic hockey, and really, all forms of hockey, no matter the level remind me, as current stars Alexander Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin shout, as the pushing-40 crowd of Peter Forsberg, Jaromir Jagr, and Sergei Federov remind, and, as too, do those giants of the past, the Yzermans, Gretzkys, and Tretiaks: hockey belongs to everyone.

And, even if Canada wins a gold medal, hockey will always belong to all of us. No inferiority complex. No superiority complex.

Just our sport. The world's. It belongs to us all.