Canada’s Game Suffers a National Disaster

North American professional hockey has a champion from Colorado named the Avalanche.

The Avalanche won the Stanley Cup by chasing a glowing puck around Denver and skating around plastic rodents in Miami and sweeping a team from Florida named the Panthers in a little more than 4 2/3 games.

Canada?

Oh, Canada?

Is there anyone left to comment?

Or has everyone up there packed up and moved to Iceland?

Once upon time, Canada had a national pastime. It invented a game that was played on ice, by players wearing skates and carrying curved sticks, and a small, black disk would be slapped at and swatted and passed and shot, and what happened to this disk was often the cause of great excitement.

The disk was not difficult to see, not by eyes born and reared in Canada.

The disk was made of vulcanized, not canonized, rubber, so it did not have a halo.

When someone carrying a curved stick hit the disk extremely hard, you could tell because there would be a loud crack, some scattered ice shavings and large welts on the body of the player who happened into its path. The disk did not look like a comet or have a red tail or prompt a speedometer reading to pop up on the television screen so Canadians at home could slap their foreheads and gasp, “Oh, wow, that’s movin’ fast, eh?”

When one of these disks eluded the grasp of the masked man in front of the net and wound up in the back of the webbing, rubber rats did not descend onto the ice. In Canada, the ice was sacred. Nothing was to be tossed upon it except teeth or gloves, as per the long-standing ritual that preceded the ceremonial fisticuffs.

(Occasionally, when games had to be played in Detroit, sea creatures, most often octopi, would be tossed onto the ice. But Detroit was not Canada and this breach of decorum was tolerated as an amusing display by outback savages who did not know better.)

Canada spread the word of this game, missionary-like, to the hinterlands of Detroit, Chicago and Boston, where the natives were gradually converted, although Canada remained lord and master. Teams from Montreal and Toronto won most of the earliest trophies, followed later by teams from Edmonton and Calgary.

For 75 years, no team south of Philadelphia won the trophy. In 1993, a team from Los Angeles tried, but Montreal, having played the game longer, spotted one Los Angeles player with a stick more curved than the rule book allowed and smote the challengers from that point on, ultimately prevailing, four games to one.

That, however, was the beginning of the decline and fall of the Canadian empire.

In the autumn of 1993, a team from Anaheim, Calif., named “the Mighty Ducks” was permitted to share the same ice as Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. So was a team from Miami, joining other teams from Tampa, Dallas and San Jose.

In the autumn of 1994, businessmen and lawyers meeting in New York decreed that no games would be played from October to January.

In the summer of 1995, after the traditional schedule had been sliced in half, a team from New Jersey won the trophy and the team from Quebec moved to Denver.

Worse than that, the team from Quebec changed its name from the “Nordiques” to the “Avalanche.”

Worse than that, the team from Quebec now named the “Avalanche” beat the team from Florida named the “Panthers” to bring Colorado the trophy, which had never spent even a day in Quebec.

The annual championship series lasted longer than four games but not quite five. The fourth game was 0-0 after three periods, 0-0 after four periods, 0-0 after five periods.

Almost five minutes later, a German playing for Colorado blasted the disk past a Detroit-born goaltender playing for Florida and the biggest prize in the sport went to a city that had no major-league hockey between 1982 and 1995, to a team named after a natural disaster.

Now, since Montreal became the last Canadian team to win the championship, the trophy holder’s list looks as such:

1994: New York.

1995: New Jersey.

1996: Colorado.

Now, with the team from Winnipeg moving to Phoenix, only six Canadian teams remain in North America’s premier hockey league. With two of those being the Ottawa Senators and the Edmonton Oilers, Canada’s chances of reclaiming the trophy any time soon have dwindled to a post-Zamboni trickle.

Canada has lost its trophy, and it has lost its game, to a cable-fed American audience that believes hockey ought to be a fast-action hybrid of arena football, the Xtreme Games and “Mortal Kombat”--only more visual.

The rubber disk’s red glare?

Cartoon robots bursting on air?

They gave proof, overnight, that the Canadian pastime was no longer theirs.