O Canada, my (summer) home and (not) native land.
Tonight, I root for thee.
Yes, that makes me an American rooting against Americans, which is un-American. But, hey, I have my reasons.
We’re talking about the so-called 4 Nations Face-Off, the round-robin hockey tournament that is down to two nations. Tonight’s championship game is Team USA versus Team Canada. It will be played at Boston’s TD Garden, an arena named for a Toronto-based bank — and owned by a Buffalo-based company.
(As it happens, Delaware North’s global headquarters offers expansive views of Buffalo’s gateway to Canada, Fort Erie.)
It’s fine if you think my rooting interest makes me unpatriotic. Go ahead, call me a snowflake. (Canada gets a lot of those in winter.) Look, I rooted hard for Team USA to beat Team Canada in the finals of the 2010 Winter Olympics, in Vancouver. Ryan Miller, then goaltender of the Buffalo Sabres, was voted the tournament’s Most Valuable Player. Alas, Team Canada won in overtime on Sidney Crosby’s golden goal.
And I rooted for the Czech Republic to beat Canada in the semifinals of the 1998 Winter Olympics, in Nagano, Japan. Dominik Hasek, then the Sabres goalie, stoned a murderers’ row in a classic shootout: Theo Fleury, Ray Bourque, Joe Nieuwendyk, Eric Lindros, Brendan Shanahan. (All red-blooded Canadians know a national lament: How on earth did Wayne Gretzky not get to take a shot?) But all of that was then. This is now.
And I’m all in for Canada.
As you’ve no doubt heard, the American president says he wants to make Canada the 51st state. The very notion is deeply disrespectful. Canadians sometimes can’t quite define their national identity, but this much they know for sure: They are not us. “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” Pierre Trudeau famously told the National Press Club in Washington in 1969, when he was prime minister. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”