Near the beginning of his meditation on hockey, The Game, former professional goalie Ken Dryden describes a scene that typifies the Canadian imagination in action:
[W]e pass a construction site...surrounded by a high white plywood fence... On the fence, every seventy-five or a hundred feet, "POST NO BILLS" has been painted... About midway along the fence, painted above a section framed with molding to make it look like a large bulletin board, it reads "POST BILLS HERE." Scores of notices in tiny rows have been pasted up...completely filled. Along the half city-block of high white fence where several times it says "POST NO BILLS," no bills have been posted.
The tendency to romanticize the game of hockey is pandemic to the Canadian imagination. In terms of nostalgia, community memories, dreams of the future and obsessions with the "Americanization" of Canada, hockey takes centre stage - or, more appropriately, centre rink - in the thoughts of Canadian popular culture. This is not to denigrate either the game of hockey or the Canadian imagination: every culture has its myths - this is one of ours. The Americans to the south of us have the Cowboy and the West; never mind the fact that we have cowboys and a West, or that Mexican vaqueros actually were the majority of American cowboys. That is their myth, a part of their national identity - however illogical, non-exclusive or ahistorical. Hockey serves the same function in the Canadian sense of identity, with the same qualifiers of historical inaccuracy, lack of logic and shared experience with non-Canadians. That is the beauty of myth, it transcends those rational limitations. Still, since the romanticized myth is so much a part of "Canadian-ness," one cannot simply slough it off as an enjoyable fantasy, or relegate it to second-tier status in terms of cultural consideration. Hockey may be a sport, but it is more than a game.
Hockey is probably our only universal cultu...