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through fifty-minute ice slots, but “in my backyard and basement.” Where he could try things and, when they didn’t work out, try them again and again and again until they did. Where he could experiment without being criticized.
    Where he could play.
    That, of course, is what should give us all hope for this game that is, at the moment, going through some rough times in this country. Gather sportswriters anywhere and they will always mention two things about the game of hockey. The first, and the one Canada should be most proud of, is how remarkably “decent” the vast majority of hockey players have remained at a time when boorish behaviour among professional athletes is far more the norm than the exception. Ken Rappoport, who has covered sports out of New York City for the Associated Press for decades, once told me he thought there must be a connection to all those early practices hockey players head out for with their mother or father. “Someone’s got to make those drives,” he said. “If there’s no family support they won’t have the right equipment and they won’t be able to afford to play the game. There has to be that family environment or they don’t become hockey players.”
    The other thing they invariably mention is the sheer pleasure that this game seems to bring all those who play it, from the smallest children to the most jaded professional to the overweight old-timers Thursday nights at midnight. Sportswriters rarely see baseball, football or basketball players still playing their games, but it is not at all unusual to come across a group of NHL multimillionaires playing with a roll of tape in the rink corridors, or finding a group of players—Russians, Swedes, Finns, Czechs, Canadians—staying out on the ice at the end of a practice to see who can put the most point shots off the crossbar.
    It is the sheer joy of hockey that will save it from money and television ratings and obsession with size and poor officiating and so much expansion that soon clutching and grabbing will become part of the “skills competition” at the annual All-Star Game.
    For even if every NHL team in Canada left this country for New Mexico, there would still be someone willing to go out with a wide shovel and the firehoses and flood the school rink for nothing but the pleasure of knowing that a child might put on his or her skates and pick up a stick and chase a puck and feel, if even for the briefest moment, what it is to play the sweetest game of all.
    I worry about the game, but do not despair. Each mail delivery brings another pencil-printed letter from a Screech Owls reader who wants me to know that he—and ever more often she—loves this game as no other play they have found. Nor will I ever forget that eighteen months when I covered, full-time, the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, the Spicer Commission, and how every session in all those church basements and community halls and large-enough living rooms began with the same question, a commissioner asking the people gathered that evening—usually older, always concerned—what it was they loved about this great big country. Medicare, they answered. And hockey. Always the first two mentioned.
    The reason is simple: Hockey means more to Canadians than mere sport. “Hockey is Canada’s game,” Ken Dryden and I wrote in the book
Home Game
. “It may also be Canada’s national theatre … it is a place where the monumental themes of Canadian life are played out—English and French, East and West, Canada and the U.S., Canada and the world, the timeless tensions of commerce and culture, our struggle to survive and civilize winter.”
    It is also fun. Fun tomorrow in that little Prairie rink when no one else in their right mind would be up. Fun this weekend when the child, or grandchild, is standing at the end of the bed pulling on your blankets to get