Jack Hughes, who scored the winning overtime goal for Team USA, celebrates after defeating Canada in the men's ice hockey gold medal game.Carolyn Kaster/The Associated Press
This weekend, American actor Connor Storrie will host Saturday Night Live. Storrie is best known as the Russian half of the Russo-Canadian love affair that animates Heated Rivalry.
That makes him the first hockey player – in quotes, I guess – to host SNL since Wayne Gretzky did it in 1989. That was several months after Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings, and people began to succumb to the mass delusion that roller blading makes you look attractive.
‘Gretzky invades L.A.’ was hockey’s high-water mark in the wider culture. Bigger than 1972 (Summit Series) or 1980 (Miracle on Ice).
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It is being surpassed right now, this week. Hockey has never been more central, more discussed, more widely liked, and more widely disliked than it is at this exact moment. Apparently, American sweetheart Quinn Hughes will be on SNL as well, which means his brother Jack must be in the mix somewhere. Gary Bettman must be floating an inch off the ground.
A year ago, hockey was also enjoying a surge, but in the only place it ever surges – Canada. Patriotism was back in fashion, which meant we were once again leaning on the thing we can all agree we do well. Winning the 4 Nations helped.
But that did not change hockey’s core proposition – as a niche, regional concern. Canada, the colder parts of Europe and a few pockets in the northeastern and midwestern United States. Mostly, Canada.
Hockey has always been to this country what an obscure band is to a teenager. On the one hand, you would like your prescient good taste acknowledged by the band’s move into the mainstream. On the other, nothing would cause you more pain.
Things that are mainstream can be good, but they are never cool, and eventually they will be deeply uncool. Hockey is cool now.
Heated Rivalry started it by bursting the sport’s boundaries, moving it outside the people who follow the game Talmudically. There has never been such a thing as a casual hockey fan, in the sense of a person who shows up once a year for the Stanley Cup finals. You either know who Leon Draisaitl is, and have an opinion of him, or you have to ask someone how you pronounce that.
Hudson Williams, left, and Connor Storrie star in Heated Rivalry.Sabrina Lantos/The Associated Press
The Heated Rivalry hockey newcomer is not interested in arguing the 1977 Canadiens versus the 1985 Oilers. They are more likely to be American or European than they are Canadian, simply by dint of reach and numbers. If you believe what you see online, they are far more likely to be a woman than a man.
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Everyone’s delighted by this development, except hockey. You will not find any NHL players having fun with the show’s main idea – that the locker room is a seamy hotbed of sexual hijinks. As in, zero.
Whenever any of them is asked about it, they get a glassy look that shows they are accessing a file marked ‘High Importance’ containing detailed instructions about how to answer. They seem to have decided the correct thing to do is to say that anything that brings more people to the sport is GREAT, while making it very clear that they’ve never watched it. Sometimes, you can hear the gears whirring.
Fortunately, this soapy hockey naissance does not require actual hockey’s co-operation. It’s happening on its own, online and in the audience. It is self-referential, and does not need buy-in from NHLers.
If the Heated Rivalry boost is big, it’s also one note. Eventually, people would have tired of the show, unable to connect it to the hockey that’s available on TV every night. Then the Olympics began.
By hockey’s mediocre standard, the global numbers were huge. Twenty-six million Americans watched the gold-medal game. More than a quarter of the population of Czechia tuned in. It was a hit everywhere, including places that never watch hockey.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States doesn’t have an international sporting foil. Mostly, it just plays with itself. That only became important recently.
So without interviewing for the job, Canada became the proxy for all the countries around the world that would like to high stick America in the face.
Meanwhile, Canada became to Americans proof that they could do anything better than anyone – including winning at a game that most of them couldn’t have cared less about until a week ago, when they all became lifelong fans.
Full integration with the hive mind was achieved in the immediate aftermath of America’s win, when members of the men’s team were caught laughing as Donald Trump mocked the U.S. women’s team.
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There are a few media parts that when put together give you a nuclear-grade attentional bomb – social-media heat, sports heat, pop-culture heat, a mainstream news hook and a forward position in the culture wars.
All of a sudden, thanks to the human meme who lives in the White House, hockey had them all.
A month ago, Jack Hughes couldn’t stay healthy long enough to become a household name in North Jersey. Now he’s a household name everywhere. It’s a rise of Swiftian proportions.
The U.S. men's Olympic ice hockey team, with Connor Hellebuyck in front, attend President Donald Trump's State of the Union address.Pool/Getty Images
So what now?
Some sports have the ability to negotiate the onerous demands of being absolutely huge. It’s more than being good at something. It’s being able to get your head around the idea that people will love and hate you, sometimes simultaneously, and do both things at an unreasonable level.
To keep people involved, you must constantly be hammering the red buttons that got people interested in the first place. American NHLers need to be calling out Canadians and other foreign undesirables, and vice versa. The league would need to find a real Heated Rivalry in its midst. They’d have to come up with something to mimic the Olympic experience every year. Above all things – headlines.
Which is all to say, it’s not going to happen. The return to the mean is already beginning.
There’s a world in which right now, with the last smoke from the Olympic men’s final still blowing off, this is the biggest hockey ever gets.
So when this year’s NHL final goes off and it’s a disastrously unmarketable matchup like Carolina versus Dallas, hockey will at least be able to say that, for a moment there in late winter, it was a somebody.