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It was around 10 p.m. on an otherwise placid January night that the terrible truth became clear. I had been happily completing the registration form for the annual online Jeopardy test, a form which had included boxes for name, phone number, address, and then – zip code. Suddenly I noticed it: There was nothing, horror of horrors, for postal code.

The implications were disastrous. The lack of a postal code box on an American website only means one thing: They don't want you. You are blocked. You are rejected. To them, you don't even exist.

But, surely, that couldn't be the case with Jeopardy, could it? For decades our relationship had always been so strong.

My first reaction was to consider it just some sort of honest mistake. Canadians had always been eligible for Jeopardy, even when most other U.S. game shows had failed to be so welcoming. But who ever cared about them – none were as good as America's favourite quiz show anyway. I got the feeling that, should I ever lose my passport in L.A., my first stop for help should be the Jeopardy studio, and not the Canadian consulate. Through it all, Canadians had Jeopardy, and Jeopardy had us. There was a sense of warmth.

After all, isn't the show's venerable host, Alex Trebek, a Canadian? Isn't five-time Jeopardy champion Michael Daunt a Canadian? Surely the producers couldn't be turning their backs on that.

Over the past eights years I'd taken the online test four or five times, and travelled to New York for a live audition twice. On one trip, one of the show's staff members deduced my Canadian identity simply by the way I pronounced the word "road," which he then proceeded to mimic by drawing out the "oa" for several seconds in the most nasal way possible. It was a gentle teasing, typical among friends, and made me feel immediately welcome.

After both auditions they told me my name went into a pool with about 2,000 other successful candidates, from which names would be randomly selected over the coming months. I lived in hope, but the call never came. (Cynicism has led me to wonder whether my name actually did go into the pool, or whether they were simply too polite to tell me I was too ugly to be on their show, but would be their first call should they launch a radio version.)

Of course, my hopes of appearing on the show were always tempered by worry about humiliating myself by recording the lowest score in the history of the program, but there was hope nonetheless.

Now, apparently due to concerns over Ottawa's new anti-spam legislation, those hopes are gone. In their place is a new, far less wonderful hope: That this bureaucratic tangle will be cleared in time for the next online test.

Alas, it's too late for this year. For the next twelve months – at least – Canadians will have no choice but to sit on the sidelines, watching only Americans take part. This will be hard.

Imagine our frustration as Joe from Denver or Agnes from Dubuque remain feebly mute throughout an entire hockey category, or venture a guess that Toronto is the capital of British Columbia. It will be unbearable. It will be painful. Those should be our questions, Alex.

I suppose we could just fill in a fake zip code, and hope no one notices. But that would be dishonest. Most of all, it would be un-Canadian.

Ken Carriere is an application specialist with The Globe & Mail.

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