COLUMN ONE : A TD for Canadian Identity : Football is a far different--they say better--game up north. And they are determined to keep it that way.

Miss Roughrider, resplendent in a jade-green gown, walked to the middle of the field at the end of the first quarter of the Saskatchewan-Winnipeg clash. The Saskatchewan Roughriders had already taken the lead, the sun was playing off the cheerleaders’ green-and-silver pompons and the stands were filled to capacity with fans showing the effects of long, boozy bus rides in from the prairie to the excitement of a pro football game.

Surrounded by her court on the hash marks, Miss Roughrider reached into a golden urn and pulled out a name--the winner of a new color TV and videocassette-recorder.

“Now, there’s something you won’t see in the NFL,” said a California sportswriter taking in a Canadian Football League game while visiting his in-laws in Saskatchewan. “Door prizes.”

As it happens, there’s plenty to see at a CFL game that Americans won’t find at their own National Football League stadiums. Not only is there the slightly old-fashioned charm of beauty queens, door prizes and box offices that sell space on the edge of the field after the seats are all taken (“We never turn anyone away,” said Roughriders publicist Jim Dorash); there is also serious pro football being played north of the border.

Not only serious, most Canadians will tell you--a better brand of football than its professional American counterpart.

Beneath their boast is a central fact of Canadian existence.

Scratch a Canadian and you are apt to find an ardent if somewhat anxious nationalist, always on the alert for evidence that his is a separate country, with its own folkways, its own culture, its own way of looking at the world.

Canadians may dress like Americans, talk much like Americans, eat hot dogs and swill beer like Americans and share a 5,482-mile undefended border with Americans--but even the most cursory investigation of Canadian society will turn up an array of discrete institutions, built in the name of unifying this country and shielding it from insalubrious cultural encroachments from south of the border.

There is the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., for instance, established in large measure to preserve the Canadian mind from the inroads of the American mass media. There is the National Film Board, which produces distinguished fictional and documentary works on Canadian themes, on the well-founded assumption that Hollywood won’t do the job.

There is Telefilm, which finances independent Canadian productions, and the Canada Council, which bankrolls Canadian artists to a far greater extent than the National Endowment for the Arts does in the United States.

There are the Via Rail passenger trains crisscrossing Canada, on tracks laid more than 100 years ago to link British Columbia with eastern Canada and discourage American ambitions to annex the Canadian west.

There are economic and social schemes--universal health care, “baby bonuses” for mothers, generous unemployment insurance--that Canadians tout as evidence that their society is the kinder, gentler and saner half of North America.

Middle-class Canadians may not ride the trains or need the baby bonuses, but they want them kept in place, as icons of Canadian sovereignty. Just ask Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. When he tried to scale back some of the beloved but costly “Canadianisms,” nationalists fought him every inch of the way, railing that he was imitating American economic policy. Mulroney wound up the most unpopular prime minister in the history of public-opinion polling.

Then there is Canadian football.

Americans often think of the CFL--if they think about it at all--as some kind of rest home for down-on-their-luck NFLers. But in fact, there are significant enough differences in the two games that a good number of American stars have come here and bombed.

“The games developed in parallel,” says investment counselor Mike Gilbe, extracting a pacifier from his mouth to explain helpfully, if beerfully, why the two games differ. “The Canadian game is not derived from the American game. And the American game is not derived from the Canadian game.”

In Canada, a football field is longer and wider--110 yards by 65 yards, with deep, 20-yard end zones. To cover the extra ground, the CFL adds a 12th man, who is deployed as an additional wide receiver on offense or a safety on defense. The offense has only three downs, not four, to move the ball a minimum of 10 yards. It all means a wide-open passing game, fancier playbooks than in the NFL and frequently explosive fourth quarters.

You won’t often see a Canadian team pulling into the lead by halftime and then just keeping the ball on the ground and running out the clock. In Canada, the outcomes of the last three Grey Cups--this country’s equivalent of the Super Bowl--were decided in the last three minutes of play.

CFL players have more ground to cover, so they tend to be smaller and speedier than their American counterparts--218 pounds, on average, compared to the NFL’s 231 pounds.

Canadian quarterbacks have to be able to roll out of the pocket more, thanks to the wider field, and their blockers have to have quicker lateral moves to keep up with them. Everyone has to have good endurance; with a limit of only 20 seconds between plays here, instead of 45 seconds in the United States, they have less time to recover.

“A couple of years ago they changed the size of the ball,” said 21-year-old Shaun Harder, a Winnipeg Blue Bomber fan. He referred to a slight decrease in the size of the ball to accommodate the wishes of CFL quarterbacks, virtually all of whom are bootlegged Americans. “There was a little bit of an uproar. We were worried that it was becoming more of an Americanized game. People are scared of that. We always have to maintain our own game. We have to be distinct.”

So determined are Canadians to preserve their own brand of football that in 1989, when a group of business people tried to bring an NFL franchise to Toronto, legislation was introduced in Parliament to stop the looming Yankee invasion. In the same spirit, the CFL requires every team in the league to keep 20 Canadians--tellingly known as “non-imports”--on its 36-man roster. This domestic-content rule keeps the more populous Americans from flooding into Canada and crowding out the local talent altogether.

And while there are attempts, from time to time, to Americanize the CFL rule book, these usually go nowhere. A favorite target of the would-be reformers is the single point earned on any ball kicked by the offense into the end zone that isn’t run out. Canadian critics say it’s silly to reward failure. Canadian purists have always managed to keep them at bay.

“There will always be a Canadian identity and an American identity, and Canadians will always be vehemently opposed to any kind of Americanization,” said Blue Bombers fan Peter Smilsky.

That said, though, there are cracks to be found in this athletic bulwark of the Canadian identity. In 1987, the Montreal Alouettes folded, throwing into doubt the financial health of the entire league. Fans wondered which of the eight remaining franchises would be next to pull the plug. Some even said the whole CFL would go. Sports Illustrated magazine sent a reporter to Canada to cover what his editors felt would be the last Grey Cup ever.

“Ambulance-chasing,” grumbled a CFL team publicist.

The doomsday scenarios turned out to be wrong. But even though things have picked up over the last couple of seasons, most CFL teams are still deep in the hole. And Cassandras are saying that the only reason average attendance is up for the league is the Toronto Argonauts’ move to a state-of-the-art, retractable-roofed stadium. People are coming to check out the architecture, say the skeptics--not necessarily the team.

And therein lies another facet of the Canadian character--what popular historian Pierre Berton calls the “Great Put-Down.” Canadians may want to promote a national culture, he says, but they’ll be damned if they deify anybody in the process.

Matt Dunigan knows. Dunigan, star quarterback of the Toronto Argonauts and one of the best-paid players in the CFL, is an “import.” An Ohio-born football hero at Louisiana Tech, Dunigan was considered too short for the NFL. At 5-feet-9, he would have had difficulty seeing over the heads of his offensive linemen.

Dunigan says he’s glad he came to Canada, where his height is no problem. He’s even thinking about pursuing a non-athletic career here once his playing days are over. But he is baffled by the endless put-downs he hears from Canadian fans.

“You get all this stuff thrown in your face: ‘Well, the CFL’s just not marketable,’ ” he says. “In the United States, football is spectacular. It’s glamorous. It’s ‘Monday Night Football,’ cameras at 20,000 different angles. Here, it’s just been a battle to go out there and promote the CFL. I’m telling you, it’s been a constant struggle.”

Television, which rains tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue on NFL teams each year, is one factor. With only one-tenth the U.S population, Canada also has proportionately fewer TV viewers--and no American-style mega-contracts.

Player salaries show this: The highest-paid player in Canadian football, quarterback Doug Flutie of the British Columbia Lions, is reputed to make just under $400,000 a year. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana reportedly clears $5 million.

Without big television earnings, Canadian teams rely heavily on gate receipts. And to encourage attendance, they have blacked out television coverage of home games for years.

With the rise of pay TV from the United States, though, the strategy has backfired for the CFL. Instead of supporting their local team in person, many Canadians in recent years have been staying home and watching “imported” NFL games on the tube.

“You can see 10 NFL games on a weekend (in Toronto), and you can maybe see one CFL game,” said David Shoalts, a football writer for Toronto’s Globe and Mail. “For years, you’ve had an entire generation of kids growing up without watching their home teams on television. They grew up watching the (NFL’s) Buffalo Bills.”

In the process, Canadians in the big media markets of Toronto and Montreal have succumbed to the siren song of American popular culture, coming to the conclusion that while the NFL may be boring, it--and not the CFL--is major league.

Toronto aggravated the mentality by acquiring a major league baseball team in 1977; now baseball is chic in Toronto and football is considered second-rate. The new World League of American Football, expected to field a team in Montreal, may make matters worse.

But if the increasingly Americanized tastes of big cities like Toronto and Montreal drive out the CFL, it will be the people here in Saskatchewan who suffer most. Regina--a homey prairie city that once went by the infelicitous name of “Pile o’ Bones”--doesn’t have much else.

“Football is the only thing we’ve got here,” said Barrie Hutchinson, 48, a shipper for a local wholesale food co-op. He’s had Roughriders season tickets for 20 years. Once, the team went for 11 straight years without making it into the Grey Cup playoffs. Hutchinson, like most fans, kept coming anyway, cheering the ‘Riders even as they lost. “You can’t desert the boys,” he said.

The Roughriders, like most CFL teams in western Canada, are community-owned, and that does wonders for fan loyalty. Management, which has no rich business-exec owner to fall back on, bends over backward to court the fans, staging ladies’ nights, lotteries and banquets and shipping the players out to every hamlet that demands an audience.

The ‘Riders charge only $180 for season passes to the best seats in the stands. In 1987, when there was a recession, they let farmers trade wheat and even turkeys for football tickets.

After the Roughrider-Blue Bomber game, the fans trooped down the ramps and out onto a nearby practice field for soft drinks and hamburgers laid on by the team’s front office. Barrie Hutchinson stood in the drifting smoke from the grill, a hamburger in each hand, musing about the future of the Canadian game.

“I think we’ll always have the CFL,” he said. “In summer and fall, football is the No. 1 thing for sports fans to attend. So we got behind the team, and we’ve stayed behind the team, even through the bad years. It’s the only thing we’ve got that’s professional, that links us with the rest of the country.”

How The Canadian Game Differs CFL Players: 12 per side on the field Downs: 3 to make 10 yards NFL Players: 11 per side on the field Downs: 4 to make 10 yards