The Canadian sin

A fairy-tale season that seemed destined to culminate with the franchise's first Stanley Cup title instead ended in profound disappointment Wednesday night for the Canucks.

But what about the other team's fairytale? They had one too.

I was a hard core hockey fan once. Then I went to see the Edmonton Oilers. Twice. It was the legendary Oilers squad when Gretzky was playing at the height of his powers. I went away depressed, especially the second time.

'Legendary" is the right word to describe famous moments in hockey. If you had, as I had up until that point, gotten all of your knowledge about the Edmonton Oilers from watching games on television and reading articles and books about them there was an important thing about the team you would have been in complete ignorance of. Because the commentary always talked about the brilliant plays, the tactical genius and so forth. They never mentioned that even by hockey standards, which are not impressive, the Oilers were a very dirty team. Especially Mark Messier and Esa Tikkanen.

They weren't the dirtiest team to play the game but they were dirty players and that dirtiness was one of two factors that had much more to do with their winning than anyone wants to admit.

The other was that the game officials protected Gretzky. Gretzky was a brilliant player and would have been effective even if they hadn't been but he was a lot more effective given that every player on the ice knew they could end up in the penalty box for what would have been a perfectly legal body check on any other player in the league.

The Canadian sin is the desire to see the world in terms of fairy tales. We invest ourselves in fantasies about moral destiny based on nothing but our desire that it should be so. Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of the game of hockey knows that high-scoring teams tend to come unstuck in the playoffs. When it really matters, such a team can always be ___ed up and that is what happened here.

It's the nature of the game and always has been. If you had to put hockey on the spectrum of sports it belongs down towards the same end as professional wrestling. It's not anywhere as bad as professional wrestling but it tends in that direction. And the big reason it remains this way is that we Canadians never seem to lose the capacity to look at this vicious frontier game and convince ourselves that we are watching a finesse game with fairytale storyline.

And nothing will even get us to question that. Not even this:

It was the first unleashing of tear gas in the city since the infamous Stanley Cup riots that erupted in 1994, when the Canucks also lost the seventh game of the Cup final.

 I love the Globe's headline on that story by the way "Rioting overshadows hockey as Vancouver reels after Game 7 loss". Yeah, like the way the Lincoln assassination overshadowed a good play.