Canada Mourns World Cup Setback

There are no burning ruins as there were during the War of 1812, no families divided or lands lost as there were during the Revolution. But Canada was in mourning Sunday nonetheless after watching a piece of its sometimes tenuous national identity get seized, packaged and shipped to the United States at the close of the World Cup of Hockey tournament on Saturday.

“Team Canada: Team Collapse,” is how the Toronto Star characterized the nightmarish 5-2 loss in Game 3 of the best-of-three finals in Montreal to a U.S. team that veritably gloated over besting hockey’s presumed masters.

In a nation whose history and current events often are framed in relationship to the United States, a few truly local constants have emerged. Hockey is one.

Or at least it was. At dinner parties and bars, on the sidelines of sporting matches and at the counters of coffee stands, there developed a shared dread as the U.S. team took the victory lap around the rink at Molson Centre on Saturday night, ending the eight-nation tournament that featured many of the National Hockey League’s best players. “Even if you don’t play, your identity is wrapped up in it,” said Glen McArthur, a graphic designer from Toronto. “You grow up with it: Hockey, first and foremost… . On our home turf, it hurts.”

What is now called the World Cup of Hockey formerly was known as the Canada Cup, and its namesake country had only lost it once before, to the former Soviet Union. Yet that was during the Evil Empire days of the early 1980s, and while the loss stung, it was more tolerable because the competitor was so foreign and so far away.

But losing to the United States - that gas-guzzling, crime-infested, TV-obsessed leviathan next door that Canadians simultaneously love and loathe - is, as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s play-by-play noted, “a bitter pill.”

But nothing could protect Canada’s aging group of superstars from a younger U.S. team that in the end seemed to be shoving them around the ice at will.