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HALIFAX — Ken Hitchcock is a military history buff — he even partakes in re-enactments of Civil War battles — and there are times when the head coach of Team Canada finds his mind wandering when he strolls in the park opposite his hotel.
The statue there to Edward Cornwallis, 1713-1776, "Founder of Halifax," intrigues him. The plaque says nothing of the bounty Cornwallis once put on the Mi'kmaq, nothing of his later service as governor of Gibraltar, where he died just as the American War of Independence was breaking out — and nothing, certainly, of his nephew, General Charles Cornwallis, who would eventually surrender the British flag to George Washington.
It must be a terrible burden, Hitchcock thinks, surrendering on ground you thought was yours — something the defending champions would hate to do in the first men's world championship held in the country that gave hockey to the world.
The 2008 world championship is a week old — the opening rounds being played here and in Quebec City, and the medals to be decided next week in Quebec — and there are a number of observations that can now be made.
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One is that once Barrett's Privateers — the Stan Rogers song that launches every match here in Halifax — gets inside your head, only surgery can remove it.
Another is that Canadian fans aren't quite as presumed. "Surprised," is the diplomatic way International Ice Hockey Federation president René Fasel put it. "A little bit disappointed," is how Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson termed it.
They were speaking of spotty attendance at the games, but they could just as easily have been talking about passion.
Perhaps it is the quiet conservatism of Halifax, but the stands would be silent and far more gaping if it were not for the Latvians and Germans and Finns, all here, all thunderously loud and — fascinatingly — all far older than would be expected of drinkers dressed up in ornate costumes, headdresses, dyed mohawk haircuts, war paint and multisigned team jerseys.
What those who have come have seen is hockey often at the highest possible level and sometimes hockey at a bit of a drone level. The unfortunate fact of these championships is that 16 teams quality and are lumped into four sometimes confusing groups, whereas there are really only six teams that ever seem to matter in the end. The IIHF is considering cutting back to 14 teams and having two groupings, which would help slightly.
Yet another observation is almost traditional — Canada winning hockey games, but Canadian fans not yet convinced the team is for real.
It is no different this time, despite Canada's 3-0 record and despite Canada's having the single-most dominant line in the tournament in Rick Nash, Dany Heatley and Ryan Getzlaf.
While Hitchcock talks positively of other lines coming into form, it is really only the odd other forward — captain Shane Doan and young Jonathan Toews — coming into their own. Other players, most notably Jason Spezza, Heatley's setup man with the Ottawa Senators, who has seemed out of sorts and lacking in confidence.
The young American team showed the big Canadians have much to fear in speed. The inventive Norwegians showed the Canadians have concerns with strategy. The Canadians showed everyone else that when it matters, a Nash or a Heatley will find a way.
When this tournament began, the Canadians said, though no one believed them, that they were going to take a "humble" approach — but no one is interested in it being "humbling." If the usual pattern holds, Team Canada's real tournament will begin shortly, perhaps as early as today against Germany.
The concern for Hitchcock, however, is that pattern doesn't always hold — and he saw so first-hand at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, when Canada proved too big and too slow and, in the end, could not find a way.
The world championship is different, he says, with not nearly the light or the pressure felt at the Olympics.
What is happening here, however, is a slight blend, with teams using these worlds to get a fix on their Olympic entries for 2010. What we are seeing with every team, he said, is "a passing of the torch. … This is very much a young man's game now."
He points to Nash, who, at only 23, has become such a complete player he has no real need of "coaching." He is a complete player and his line so dominant that it is only natural all others pale by comparison.
"I don't think you're going to get any line that will play with the magnitude of the Nash line," Hitchcock said.
He must, however, find lines that can match the magnitude of the lines they go up against, and for some Canadian players, such as Spezza, adapting to the European "retreat game" takes some doing. Their tactics and "umbrella" can prove endlessly frustrating, as the unheralded Norwegians showed on Thursday.
"It drives me nuts," Hitchcock confessed of the European style of play. "We've got to play the North American game. We can't change the way our players play."
Hitchcock and fellow coach Pat Quinn said the same in Turin, where playing the North American game seemed to give the European teams, even little Switzerland, free ice to do with as they wished.
Here, however, as in Quebec City, the ice surface is the North American model — and the Europeans are the ones having to adapt.
If the Canadians have a secret to success in such competitions, it is that "we always ask our players to play out of character," Hitchcock said.
"We don't have success in these tournaments because of a lock on talent. We win because we work."
The time for hard work is fast coming.
"Eventually," said the man who can recite the names of the dead in Gettysburg's ill-fated Pickett's Charge, "you've got to dig in.
"You can only wave the flag so long."
