Let them have it, I say.
The silliest argument in sports -- the claim to be the Cradle of Hockey -- has taken yet another twist this week with a front-page story in The Ottawa Citizen suggesting Canada's game, like Canada's defence system, is actually . . . American.
Worse yet, a part of the United States that has never had a National Hockey League franchise and, as far as we know, shown the slightest interest in the once Canadian game.
Virginia.
The "proof" lies in an 1835 painting, reproduced on the front page in full colour, by John Toole, an Irish-American artist. It shows, unquestionably, four skaters with curved sticks -- illegal curves, we suspect -- chasing a dark, round object that is close enough to a puck that some experts are willing to concede that Virginia beats Halifax-Dartmouth.
For the moment, anyway.
Halifax-Dartmouth was last month's claim: an Art Gallery of Nova Scotia unveiling of a Confederation year lithograph by Henry Buckton Laurence showing 10 skaters with similarly curved sticks in the background of a sketch of people curling on Lake Banook.
Not only that; there was an 1867 newspaper reference to a "hockey match," which caused the gallery's Jeffrey Spalding to tag the art discovery "a momentous occasion for Canada and the world." The mayor of Halifax, Peter Kelly, declared this proof that the true birthplace of hockey is Halifax-Dartmouth.
Now we discover it may be Virginia . . . or Windsor, N.S., just up the 101 from Halifax, which has claimed for years to be the cradle of hockey and even has a road sign up underlining the point. The people of Windsor gleefully point to a reference in an 1844 work by Thomas Chandler Haliburton in which he writes about young boys "hollerin' and whoopin' " as they play something akin to shinny on Long Pond at nearby King's College.
Only last week, Windsor resident Scott Burgess turned up seven wooden pucks when he was taking out a wall in his 1860s-era home, "solid proof," Windsor hockey buffs say, that the game originated here and only here.
Bull, says Montreal, site of the first identified "hockey match," played by students at McGill University on March 3, 1875.
Balderdash, says Kingston, Ont., which was officially designated the birthplace of hockey by the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association in 1942.
All crap, I say, based on two life-altering experiences with the game in the near and distant past.
The first took place in Vienna in the spring of 1996 when, on a day off from covering the world hockey championships, I went to the famous Kunsthistorisches art museum on the advice of George Kingston, the well-known coach who has long been fascinated by the origins of the game.
On an upper floor, as Kingston had predicted, my eyes all but left my head as I walked among the works of Flemish master Pieter Bruegel (Peter the Elder), his son Pieter and Dutch painter Hendrick Avercamp, all of whom were working centuries before Toole in Virginia or Laurence in Nova Scotia.
Peter the Elder's Hunters In The Snow, painted in 1565, shows a curling match and what appears to be two youngsters playing shinny. The younger Bruegel's Winterland mit Vogelfalle, painted in 1601, also shows curling and what appears to be hockey. But the best example is Avercamp's Winterlandschaft, painted in 1605, clearly showing a man with a hockey stick across his knees in exactly the fashion of Bobby Orr 3½ centuries later.
"I'm absolutely convinced," says Kingston, who taught art before he became a hockey coach, "that the origins of the game are there." And I am equally convinced that the origins are up on Dufferin Street in Huntsville, Ont., in the early 1950s, just as there will be readers out there who will claim it was invented on a slough outside North Battleford in the 1930s, a frozen river north of Montreal in the 1940s, an outdoor rink in Winnipeg in the 1960s and, for that matter, will be discovered all over again this weekend on a small rink in a park near Edmonton.
The beauty of the game -- and there is real beauty, despite the hideous face of the game revealed last week -- is that it is continually being invented and we will no more know one day exactly where it began than we can say, today, exactly where it will end.
What we can agree on is that the time has never been so ripe for a new claim to discovering, or rediscovering, the game.
If hockey is, as so many Canadians believe, the true religion of Canada, then let's concern ourselves with it being reborn somewhere, anywhere, rather than where it may or may not have been born.
And if that necessary rebirth takes place in another American locale -- I'm thinking here of NHL headquarters, 1251 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. -- so be it.
So long as it happens.
Roy MacGregor