To play hockey for Canada in these Olympics is profane work with a sacred purpose

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Few things speak more clearly to this country’s hockey dominance than the shoddiness of its showmanship.

Hockey Canada released Team Canada’s 25-man roster at noon on Wednesday. The ceremony – and I hesitate to give it such a grand name – consisted of team GM Doug Armstrong running through a list of people to thank, while a couple of hacks from Hockey Canada looked on uncomfortably from those strange little high chairs they make people sit on at press conferences.

They did make a video. Not a good video, but a video. In it, the names of the lucky two dozen were read out by cute, but incredibly serious, kids in full equipment. Zero smiles. Zero fun. Zero pizzazz. This was the mumblecore of sports.

After a few very obvious questions with even more obvious answers – the Montreal guys asking about Nick Suzuki, a New York guy asking about Bo Horvat – that was it.

Now into the breach once more, my friends, but with more feeling than usual.

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The national debate about who should or shouldn’t make Team Canada has never caught on here the way it does in other countries, with other sports. People don’t really care that X made it over Y. That’s because Canada wins.

It is Canada’s strongly held belief that you could walk into a Tim Hortons in Brandon and start pointing – ‘You, you, you, you and you’ – and walk out with a pretty good hockey team. That we are good at a lot of things, but exceptional in this one regard. We can beat you with our second or third or fifth best.

The conversation around hockey in this country does not devolve to the finer points of skill as it does in so many other sports elsewhere. You don’t tune in to Hockey Night in Canada and get Chiron’d to death about who should be where, going in which direction, as they attack the defensive zone. Those who try to broadcast that way never catch on.

Because Canadians don’t think hockey is a matter of skill. They believe – really, deeply believe – that it’s a question of will. That the team that that is willing to do whatever is required, and then do a little more, is the one that will come out on top.

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That folk belief was born during the original impossible victory at the Summit Series. Anybody who’s watched the games (they’re all on YouTube) can see that the Soviets were the better team. I’m tempted to put that word in quotation marks. They were the more skilled team. At times, they ran literal rings around the Canadians, who’d never seen anyone skate in rings before.

But pushed up against a bunch of guys who must have had visions of the gulag playing at the backs of their minds, the Canadians wanted it more. In a battle of real soldiers versus small-town irregulars, Canada won.

A national lightbulb went off. This is who we were – the people who would play you straight up until that didn’t work, and then we would Bobby Clarke you. People who didn’t know when they were beaten.

Had Canada lost in Moscow, this would be a different country. That’s not to say it would be worse, only that it would be altered in some fundamental way.

All the hockey played since then, more than a half-century of it, is insignificant against that original achievement.

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It was a bummer to lose the Canada Cup in ’81, but even the most committed capitalist must have thought the commies were owed one. To keep it interesting, if nothing else.

It would have stung to lose in ’87 and ’91, with Gretzky, Lemieux and Messier in their primes, but we would have handled it. Except we didn’t have to. Our protean self-belief became attached to a single pursuit – hockey.

What would have happened if American Zach Parise had scored the golden goal in Vancouver instead of Sidney Crosby? Disappointing, sure. The national party that followed that Olympics would have been quieter. But it would still have been a great party. The message out of it would have been, ‘Next time’. As it turns out, they got them next time anyway.

Because Canada believes that if Canada wants it bad enough, Canada will win. Not can win. Will.

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Now we’re back in a 1970 moment.

The Soviets presented a threat to our lives, while the current American regime does so to our standard of doing so. It’s not the same threat, but it’s still a threat.

There’s only one place we are capable of fighting back, that has history and meaning and that we’ve sung songs about. Granted, it’s not 1066 or the Battle of Bunker Hill, but we all work with what we have.

Every man just named to Team Canada is an exceptional player. I trust they all skate and puck handle at the most elite level.

I suppose someone will have strong feelings about Suzuki over Connor Bedard or Darcy Kuemper over Scott Wedgewood, but I doubt it catches much traction outside the nerdiest hockey circles.

Because everybody knows what matters in a Team Canada player, and it isn’t computed in left-handed vs right-handed shots from the blue line.

To put on the sweater in 2026, with the world we’ve all grown up in fluxing like it has not fluxed for ages, is to accept a patrimony. Athletes love to talk about “the honour of representing my country.” Most of them say it in a way that suggests they’ve memorized the phrase, and never actually thought about it.

This Team Canada should think about it. Everywhere else, they are playing for a living. For 11 days in Milan, they will be playing to keep a national mythology burning. It’s profane work with a sacred purpose.

It’s possible they can lose, but to be Canadian is to believe to a certainty that that won’t happen. Not because we are better than everyone else, but because when it comes to this one thing, we are built different.