No. 249: LATVIA < KAZAKHSTAN / A meditation on the indignities of Canadian youth & That Supposed Hockey Holiday Tradition™

To the teenagers feeling the heat in Ottawa these last few days, my expression of consolation: It's not that it could be worse ... it has in fact been a lot worse and I was around for it.

AN EVENT in Ottawa on Friday wouldn’t have registered in the sports media in the U.S., nor much globally outside hockey hotbeds, but in Canada Christmas was officially cancelled after Latvia beat the host country’s shiniest exemplars of male teenhood at the world under-20 junior hockey championships.

The lads lost to boys in dingy maroon in 3-2 in an opening-round contest with the shoot-out stretching to the eighth round, but even before the playing of “Dievs, svētī Latviju” (the Latvian national anthem), heads of households were pushing their conifers through wood-chippers, re-boxing hanging ornaments and deflating Santas on front lawns in all ten provinces and the three territories. Other religious holidays were likewise suspended because of the cataclysm. There’s no other word to describe Canada’s best losing a hockey game to a country that Canadians can’t find on a map.