My country or my team: testing hockey loyalties
The prime minister wants all Canadians to demonstrate their loyalty not the same kind of loyalty President Donald Trump demanded of FBI director James Comey before he fired him. No, the loyalty Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was talking about relates to something much more intimate and ingrained.
PMJT wants Canadians to put aside their partisanship and cheer for the Ottawa Senators against the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Eastern Conference final series of the NHL Stanley Cup play-offs. The Sens, if you're not following this, are the last team standing from the five Canadian clubs that made the post-season.
"We’re all happy to support Ottawa right now — even Torontonians and Montrealers can agree on this particular one,” the PM said.
If the Pens are on their game, this series may be all but over by the time you read this - as may the Trump presidency the way it's going - but the principal remains the same. Should one put patriotism above devotion to one's team?
(As of this writing, the Sens were ahead 1-0 after an overtime win in Game One on Saturday.)
Your scribe's slavish fealty to his club is well-known and regularly ridiculed. That said, perhaps in the Canadian spirit of open-mindedness and resistance to fanaticism, the prime minister's entreaty should be given reasonable consideration.
So what reasons might Buds and Habs fans have for getting behind the Sens? First, folks have to get past the false advertising - why is a Roman "senator," usually sporting a laurel wreath and toga, depicted as a centurion in full battle headwear, on the team uniforms?
Leafs fans might (or might not) have a secret sweet spot for the Sens since they took the team's beleaguered captain Dion Phaneuf off their hands last year, paving the way to the exciting rebuild this past season. There's also Leafs castoff Clarke Macarthur, whose comeback in the first-round series against Boston after suffering a serious concussion in the pre-season is a feel-good story of the play-offs.
Quebec fans might warm to the fact the Sens have four francophones on the team, albeit only one from Quebec, veteran Alex Burrows. For the record, the Pens have three francos on the roster, including go-to goalie Marc-andre Fleury, and injured star defenseman Kris Letang.
The Sens coaches have great Quebecois cred, starting with the Sens enigmatic head coach Guy Boucher, a Mcgill grad from Notre Dame du Lac on Lac Temiscouata, who coached major junior in Rouyn-noranda, Rimouski and Drummondville. Boucher's associate coach is Marc Crawford, who earned the Jack Adams coaching award for his debut season with the Quebec Nordiques in 1995 before moving with the team to Denver where he won a Stanley Cup with the Avalanche. Crawford's assistant coach with the Nordiques, coincidentally, was Jacques Martin, a future Jack Adams winner with the Senators, who went on to a disappointing three-year stint with the Canadiens.
It's a piece of hockey irony that Crawford now faces Martin, an assistant coach with the Penguins, as both former star bench bosses go through professional rehabilitation.
There may be some folks willing to root for the Sens because of another son of Quebec, Shawville native Bryan Murray. The former head coach, GM and now senior advisor, is fighting an inspirational battle against cancer three years after being handed a bleak diagnosis. As coach, Murray led the Sens to the Stanley Cup final in 2007, so another trip to the top ten years later would be a stirring story.
On a personal level, it's another type of loyalty, the enduring attachment to home town roots, that provides a more or less flimsy excuse to back the Sens. By my count, three of the Senators' coaching support staff, one a former player, hail from my neck of the woods. If I really want to stretch things, I can claim to be related, through a cousin, to one of the Sens players.
Still, hardly the kind of bonds to compel one to paint the face red, black and gold. So, make your choice, Canada, either suck it up and cheer for the Sens, or make a political statement and defy the PM.