By JOHN BRANCH
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — There was no chance that the Very Rev. Glenn Dion would change the time of his 12:30 Sunday Mass at Holy Rosary Cathedral, a couple of blocks from the site of Sunday’s Olympic gold medal hockey game between Canada and the United States.
Well aware of the game’s 12:15 start time, Father Dion said: “We have seven Masses on Sunday, and we don’t cancel any of them. Not even for a hockey game”.
Then he made a confession. The 11 o’clock Mass would be shorter than usual, he told a full congregation, some wearing Team Canada clothes and one boy wrapped in a Canadian flag.
“I’ll try to get you out of here so you can get yourself in front of a TV,” Father Dion said, before offering a prayer for “the good fellows soon to start playing for the gold”.
The depth and breadth of hockey’s place in Canadian culture can be hard to fathom beyond the borders. But it now might be heard, echoing from the north, thanks to a 3-2 overtime victory over the United States in the final event of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
To hear Canadians tell it, the hockey gold medal has come home, where it belongs.
Canada did not win as many medals as it had hoped at these Olympics, which closed on Sunday night, but it won more golds (14) than any country in history. The last, an emphatic exclamation point on the 2010 Vancouver Games, will be collectively cherished more than any other.
This, after all, is a country whose $5 bill has a scene of children playing hockey on a pond, with a quotation from the short story “The Hockey Sweater,” by Roch Carrier:
“The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places — the school, the church and the skating rink — but our real life was on the skating rink”.
Hockey, the Canadian poet Richard Harrison once said, “is the national id”.
Father Dion did not blanch at the suggestion that hockey is religion in Canada. Rather, he detailed the natural congruencies: both are ingrained from a young age, passed among generations, studied and practiced reverently and — in the case of the Catholic parish, at least — have a box where sinners sit in penance.
At the last Mass on Sunday before the puck dropped, Father Dion offered a prayer — a request, really — for the Canadians: “To be humble when and if they win. And to be gracious if they don’t”.
As overtime began in what might now be the biggest game ever in Canada, a crowd smothered a block of Robson Street and squinted through the pale sunlight at a small video screen. The action was barely discernible and the mood was nervous. Someone began singing the national anthem.
In a moment, everyone was singing “O Canada”. And when Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal, the singing turned to cheers and tears and hugs. Dozens of Canadian flags were raised in the air, many hung from the working end of a hockey stick.
The collective psyche was on full display inside Canada Hockey Place, bathed mostly in red-clad fans who cheered wildly for the home team, never more than when the gold medals were placed around the necks of the players, particularly Crosby, the 22-year-old superstar who solidified his status as the latest Canadian hockey legend.
It was seen on the painted, tear-streaked faces of fans as they spilled into the streets from bars and homes, desperate to share the experience. Cars quickly carried reveling reinforcements from the far-flung suburbs. Even the police, anxious about how the celebrations would end as the day turned to night, zipped up Pender Street with their horns blaring, a driver’s fist pumping out the window.
Across the continent, about 3,000 miles away, friends of Crosby’s gathered to watch the game in his hometown, Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. Paul Mason, one of Crosby’s youth coaches, wore one red sock and one white one as he watched with family and about 40 friends.
“It means so much,” Mr. Mason said. “It’s why we wake up at 4:30 in the morning to practice, and why we stay up every Saturday night watching ‘Hockey Night in Canada’”.
Sunday’s game was probably the most-watched television program in Canada’s history, the type of cultural touchstone that people will remember, years from now, as much for what happened as for where they were when it did.
There was no immediate declaration of a Canadian national holiday or even a day off from school or work. A victory parade is implausible, as the National Hockey League, where all of Sunday’s players earn lucrative livings, resumes its schedule with a game on Monday and a full slate on Tuesday.
Fans needed no prompting to celebrate other than the sight of Crosby tossing his stick, flinging his gloves, raising his arms and receiving the hugs of teammates.
In many ways, these were the Olympics where Canadians, who consider themselves an understated lot, burst out of their modesty to become a unified, full-throated fan base. For two weeks during the Olympics, the streets of Vancouver were filled deep into the nights with people wearing “Canada” on their sleeves — and their chests, their faces and any other space that they could fill with expressions of national pride.
A Team Canada replica jersey practically became a national uniform. The national anthem became a party theme song among the generally convivial, noodle-legged celebrants. Fans draped themselves in the maple-leafed national flag.
Such brash enthusiasm surprised even the Canadians.
“The States are the chest thumpers, right?” said Darren Loudfoot, visiting from Calgary. “Now it’s everywhere here”.
The Canadians won the gold medal at the 2002 Salt Lake Games, where a Canadian ice maker surreptitiously hid a loonie — the Canadian dollar coin — in the hockey rink’s ice for luck. That victory over the United States ended a 50-year gold medal drought for Canada, which once dominated world competition.
Slowly losing its grip on a sport considered part of the nation’s identity has been difficult for Canadians. That Sunday’s victory came against the United States, relatively indifferent to the sport despite being home to 24 of the 30 N.H.L. franchises and increasingly rivaling Canada’s talent base of players, made it all the more satisfying. A common sign during the Olympics read: Hockey Is Canada’s Game.
“Hockey is a medium for Canadians to think about who they are,” said Andrew C. Holman, editor of “Canada’s Game: Hockey’s Identity,” released last year.
And Canadians, weary of being considered an outpost of the British crown or a conquered territory of American pop culture, see hockey as a way to define themselves on their terms.
“As important as baseball is to American culture, it isn’t anywhere near the cultural significance of hockey to Canadians,” Mr. Holman said.
After the game, the Canada Hockey Place crowd serenaded the gold medal winners with an uncommonly emotional rendition of “O Canada”. Near the Vancouver waterfront, giant air horns blew the first four notes of the song, just as they had for each of Canada’s gold medals throughout the Games.
But it was obvious that this celebratory note was different.
“From the time we’re little, we’re put on skates or given a stick,” Mr. Mason, Crosby’s former coach, said from Nova Scotia. “That’s who we are. Hockey is who we are”.
The New York Times
