Hockey is probably our only universal cultural symbol. It is universal not because every Canadian has played the game... But even those who haven't played hockey... nonetheless relate to the game. They know what it is, connect it to some context, and have some feelings about it. The point is not whether hockey is the world's best, fastest or most barbaric game; nor whether we are the best in the world at playing it. The point is...it is ours (Salutin 293).

Ours. We Canadians have a serious identity problem when it comes to assessing what is ours. Is ours an Anglo-oriented, high-culture, non-violent culture? Or is it a violence-prone, lumpen proletariat amalgam of immigrants - led by a Francophone minority that threatens secession at every political turn? Hockey, like Canadian identity, reflects this cultural schizophrenia like a mirror ready at hand.

Hockey, from its very inception, shared with the ordinary Canadian an ambiguous relationship to the concept of "our" identity. There is no questioning the fact that it grew out of p

O'Malley, Martin. "The Enforcer." In David Gowdy (ed.). Riding On The Roar Of The Crowd. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1989, 151-160.

Callaghan, Morley. "The Game that Makes a Nation." In David Gowdy (ed.). Riding On The Roar Of The Crowd. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1989, 50-52.

Hockey as the romanticized myth of the Canadian Dream both is and is not. Just as every grown person has had a childhood, then spends the rest of one's life filtering the experience through a subjective gaze called memory, so also is there the real experience of the "pure" Canadian identity and the "game" of hockey. We are Canadians by birth or choice, and we (or our menfolk or brothers or friends) did play through the long, cold Canadian winters a game called hockey - later reliving the "feel" of the occasional moment of spirit-body-mind coordination inherent in all sports via the proxy of professional masters. Like childhoods and hockey, the facts may be grimmer than the memory: the loving parent who abuses, the team spirit bought and sold by businessmen who think that civic boosterism was invented to make their profits easier to acquire. Both versions of the past are fact, if fact is composed of equal parts perception and documentation.