NSL soccer is back. I feel it’s my duty as a Canadian to support this women’s pro league

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I bought cinnamon buns recently. The bakery was warm, the buns were fresh and the young woman at the counter was patient while I paid. I don’t know what came over me but I started talking about the Northern Super League. Great pro women’s football, I said. Really doing something. Starts soon. April 24. You should watch.

Maybe I spoke a little too fast. I heard myself and felt the small embarrassment of the evangelist. I dialled it back. I gave the little apology smile for being boisterous.

Her response was immediate and entirely without qualification. She dispelled my apology with a firm wave of her hand.

She was glad I mentioned the league. Of course she was going to watch. She’d just needed someone to tell her the NSL existed.

This is not sports reporting. I want to be clear about that upfront. The NSL has fine journalists covering its signings, its standings, its tactical shape. What it does not yet have – what Canada does not yet have – is someone willing to make the argument that watching this league is not optional. That failing to watch it is, in some modest but real sense, a dereliction of duty.

So here I am.

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We are living through a moment of national vertigo. The threats are not hypothetical. The anxiety about who we are, what we are, whether we will hold together – that anxiety is real and it is daily. And we can see the pressure continuing to build.

And then there is the NSL. Twenty-five weeks of pro football, coast to coast, six clubs, a country’s worth of talent. It kicks off with Toronto visiting Vancouver in a rematch of last year’s final, wherein the rebels (Vancouver Rise FC) beat the evil empire (AFC Toronto), by the way. The NSL runs through November. All 80 matches are on TV or streamed online. The league is earnest in a way that almost nothing public in this country is any more.

I use that word carefully. Earnest. Not naive, not sentimental – earnest. The Northern Super League is unapologetically doing the right thing and it is doing it on purpose.

Consider this: when the Calgary Wild flew the mothers of their entire squad to Calgary for Mother’s Day last year, it was not a marketing stunt. It was a value expressed as an action. Calgary midfielder Meggie Dougherty Howard, a veteran of professional soccer, said it was the nicest thing she had ever experienced as an athlete.

I find that I cannot think about it without a swell of something I can only call pride. Tears, actually. Not from a team. From a country that made a league filled with women who thought it was obvious.

One year into its existence, NSL is impacting Canada’s national program

This is the thing about the NSL that the sports pages haven’t quite found language for yet: it is not merely a product. It is a civic institution. And civic institutions are rare, just like things that give back what you put in. When something appears that is both – two-way community, excellence, belonging, joy – you go. You watch. You bring someone. You become the We. This country is worth saving.

There is a tactical argument I want to make briefly, because it matters to the experience.

This country, at this moment, could use a lesson in paying attention. In staying with something through the long stretches of buildup. In understanding that the tension before the goal is not empty time – it is the whole point. The goal, when it comes, is a release that you have earned by watching. And, my fellow citizen, it is that special blend of dopamine and oxytocin that builds love.

When your team scores – when Halifax or Toronto or Calgary or Ottawa or Vancouver or Montreal billows that net – you will feel something clarifying. Something that has nothing to do with distraction and everything to do with being present in your own life. You will be becoming part of something beautiful and good that is bigger than yourself.

Pay attention until that first goal. Do that, I promise we’ll see you all season.

Robert Preece lives in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.