There are really only two Canadian winter rituals – despite what the calendar says.
Canadians start their year at Labour Day, not New Year's, and Groundhog Day is much closer to the beginning of winter than the end for most of the country.
That leaves the Christmas Break – no matter what your religion – and the world junior hockey championship, which begins on Boxing Day and runs through to Jan. 5, an 11-day festival that allows the usually sedate and humble Canadian to dress and act outrageously and scream out to the rest of the world, whether that world is listening or not, that We Are No. 1 .
Which we usually are, come the first week of January and the curious world of teenage hockey.
If Canada wins gold in Saskatoon, it will mark a record sixth successive victory in the world juniors, as the championship is commonly known. That would surpass the record five in a row that Canada set in the 1990s and matched last year. In the past 12 championships, Canada has taken to the podium for five gold, four tarnished silver and three humiliating bronze.
The two lesser medals are purposely, if unfairly, slighted, for only in hockey does Canada embrace that insulting Nike ad campaign that “You don't win silver, you lose gold.”
“When you pull on a world junior jersey,” says Team Canada forward Jordan Eberle, “you're expected to win gold. That's just how it is. We're going for six in a row.”
Eberle was the player most responsible for reaching five in a row last year in Ottawa, when he tied the game against Russia with only 5.4 seconds left to force overtime. He then scored the shootout winner to give Canada a 6-5 victory in a game the Russians had won but for a careless icing when one player foolishly tried to hit the empty Canadian net from the other side of centre ice. Eberle, a 19-year-old Regina native, will also be playing in his home province, where the fanatical Saskatchewan sports fans are expected to bring the verve they showed in this year's Grey Cup final, which Saskatchewan lost on the final play, to the hockey rink.
“People find it fun to watch,” Eberle says. “For me and for every kid on this team, we grew up watching this tournament. It's a special event. Kids grow up dreaming of playing in it.”
Willie Desjardins, the Saskatchewan-born coach of the Canadian team, says the increasing popularity of this tournament is no surprise: “It has such a great tradition and it's just caught on. Junior hockey's so big in Canada because it's your first chance to see the young stars.”
“And you're wondering ‘How they're going to be?' ‘Who's there?' ‘How's this guy going to be?' It's your first look at them,” Desjardins continues.
“The other thing is, it's more unpredictable. Once you get to the pro game, they're more predictable because they're so well-schooled. With us, because they just haven't been through it, they'll do some things that normally wouldn't happen with high-profile pro teams.
“So it's a little bit of the unknown and a little bit of the unexpected.”
What is expected, of course, is that Canada goes in as the favourite and the country fully expects its team to play for the gold medal. Sweden, however, which lost 5-1 to Canada in last year's final, will be strong again, but so, too, will be the Russians and the Americans.
Canada has already had one lucky bounce in that it heads the relatively weak Group A (Canada, United States, Slovakia, Switzerland and Latvia, which Canada plays on Boxing Day) while Group B includes powerful Sweden and Russia, Finland, Czech Republic and Austria.
