Canadians find life exists without NHL

TORONTO — As the talks to save the NHL season came to a fateful end on Wednesday, Canadians expressed a collective sigh of resignation and anger over their long winter without big-league hockey.

But the longing for their national pastime was mixed with a defiant sense that the NHL had lost its way and needed a makeover. A majority of respondents in some recent newspaper polls went so far as to say that it did not matter to them whether there would be a season or not, a sentiment echoed Wednesday on radio talk shows across the country, which were filled with unalloyed rage.

"I don't care; I've lost interest now," Wilma Bain, a 47-year-old bookkeeper from Calgary, Alberta, said minutes after the announcement. She was here visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame wearing a Calgary Flames T-shirt. "They let the fans know that there are other things to do during winter, like skiing."

Anthony Rowland, a 37-year-old police officer from Whitby, Ontario, who was visiting the museum with his family, expressed disappointment in the news. "The NHL is no longer about the love of the game," he said. "It's too bad it's about money and greed."

Those are tough words in a country where hockey is at the core of the national mythology and identity. The sport is the one thing that unites French-speaking Quebec separatists with the rest of the country. The hockey rink is the social center in nearly every town, the place where Canadians of every class dare to dream.

The sport is a constant backdrop in Canadian literature and television commercials, an enjoyable survival response to the long, freezing winter and a source of slang, with new verbs constructed from the names of NHL stars. A scene of youngsters stick-handling on a pond is embossed on the $5 bill.

In a country where many feel that they live in the shadow of the United States, even Canadians who are not sports fans express pride that hockey has been played in 65 countries since modern rules were established in the 1870s in Montreal.

"We feel our national pride through our hockey teams and hockey players, and when it is taken away from us, we lose part of our country and part of ourselves," said Doug Beardsley, a professor at the University of Victoria, where he teaches a course on hockey literature and the Canadian psyche.