Hockey Dreams by David Adams Richards

effect they do not know what a blueline is, or an offside. And they still will not by the 1992 Olympics.
    Yet here is the mythology. The underdog, against the greatest team in the world — the Russian bear. The greatest team, the greatest players, the greatest passers and skaters who ever lived. The boys who have a system. The Americans need the Russians to be just that.
    They need the Russians to be great, to be better than all the overpaid, overindulged pros. And they, a team of gutsy spirited boys from Boston and Minnesota, are about to take them on.
    It is a wonderful, wondrous mythology. It is shown on television on Christmas day in 1982 in Bartibog, NB. Canadians join them with a booming voice. It’s as if Jacques Lemaire had never come over the blueline and let his shot go into thetop corner, as if Bobby Orr never skated end to end, dazzling the spectators. As if Esposito never mesmerized the Russians about their own net, turning about to score on that corner pass from Ellis.
    To the United States, Canada is not considered enough of a foreign nation when they decide the outside world is a formidable opponent. So Canadian friends of mine sing the praise of the Russian system as well and long for the boys from Minnesota to beat them, and prove for
us
what freedom and grit can do.
    When the movie about hockey is finally made, Canada plays no part. Truth here is always somehow beside the point.
    During the Cold War, this setup between the Russians and Americans was where it was supposed to be. This was where the drama was in the American consciousness, whether it be swimming or basketball or hockey. Canadians as the greatest, as the best, as the most powerful, just got in the way of a good story line.
    In that age — in the age of my youth — with all of those people I used to know, there was no campaign about childhood safety. No worry about going up the street alone. In that age Bobby Hull was still a kid, and just in the league. Or before him, when Rocket Richard was leading the Canadiens in their golden age, I went every day to get cookies from a woman five blocks away, like a mouse hooked on sugar water. Essentially my brother and I were out on our own at thetime we were six. I knew drunks and prostitutes from the age of nine.
    And so too did a host of other children, some of them gone away for good now. When we played hockey we played it on a street, where drunks would stop to watch us, weaving back and forth, looking like the next snowflake to hit them would crumple them to the ground. They would offer us money to chase their hats, which tumbled end over end down an ice-slicked road. Earlier than that, I would watch from my bedroom window at night as kids played road hockey, and stopped to let not the car but the coal horse go by.
    The fear others had of drunks and prostitutes and physical life in general surprised me when I went off to university. The distrust of physical life is in part a distrust at a certain level about hockey and about Canadian life.
    But back to that earlier age. It’s not that mothers or fathers weren’t concerned. Perhaps it was a different concern then. Without mocking it, the accent put upon safety was not as politically correct.
    Like all truths there is a severity to it. Children did get hurt and drowned and killed. Once that winter of 1960–61 chasing a hockeyball Tobias slipped on a crust of snow, went sliding on his bum and brand new coat, disappeared over the bank and fell — 32 feet. “I’ll get it,” was the last thing we heard him say. And then, “OHHH — Ohhhh.”
    He was lucky enough not to fall over the embankment at its highest part — that would have put him right into thechimney of one of the oldest houses on the river. A little Santa without bearing gifts. But he fell to the left of the house, and landed safely in a clump of burdocks and snow.
    “Did you get it?” Stafford asked, who couldn’t see that he had fallen.
    The house far below us, on the bank of