HOCKEY LAST NIGHT: WARM WINTER SHOULD PUT A CHILL IN CANADIAN HOCKEY FANS' SPINES

Great weather we're having, eh?

Wrong. Far from it. This morning, at least in this corner of the country, people are waking up still feeling the glow of another gold-medal triumph (Canada 4, Russia 2) at the world junior hockey championship, coupled with record-high temperatures in many parts of the country. A century and a half ago, Ottawa was described as a "sub-Arctic lumber village"; today's high is 10 C. Instead of throwing sticks and skates in the back of the car and heading down to the lake or river for Saturday shinny, some people will be breaking out the golf clubs -- there are courses in eastern Ontario that will actually be open today.

Why is it so bad? Think about how this relates to the world juniors. What makes our hockey players unique and different from every other country's is that we're tougher when it comes to playing this particular sport. That quality is bred into our players in part from playing pond hockey until their feet and hands are numb from cold; back in the day -- talking 1995 here, never mind 1955 -- we all did it, even those of us who never got higher than house league. For serious players, it gets instilled further by those long bus trips in juniors, when you might end up shivering on the side of the road on a minus-35 C night in the dead of winter after the bus breaks down on the way back from a game in Swiftie or the Soo.

You can't succeed in hockey without overcoming some hardship, even if you have to create it for yourself. Time was, one of the game's great cliches was that a team was "hungry," meaning if you weren't tough and didn't win, you'd starve. (No one talks like that today. Instead, they talk in terms of being "up" or "down" -- the food analogy has been replaced by one that sounds like it came from the stock market.)

Jonathan Toews, the hero of Wednesday's shootout triumph over Team USA, does play U.S. college hockey, but he also used to get up at 3 a.m. to skate on an outdoor rink in Winnipeg, since he'd read somewhere that's what Guy Lafleur did. Getting up at 3 a.m. to skate outdoors during a Winnipeg winter? Now that's willingness to accept hardship.

Take away the cold winters, the outdoor sheets of ice. Have all of the Team Canada aspirants driven to a suburban arena by Mommy and Daddy in SUVs with remote starters and heated seats, and over time our grim-like-a-heart-attack Canadian hockey players will come to resemble American hockey players more and more.

Hockey is by and large a rich kid's game in the States and without knowing the family background of all 20 of the U.S. kids who collectively spit the bit when Team Canada was very beatable on Wednesday (which it wasn't yesterday), you could extrapolate that the kids down there who choose hockey have just had it way too easy all their lives. We have the cold and ice on our side.

So let's do something about global warming, and quick.

NHL Scoreboard

HOMETOWN BREAKDOWN

Trust the Kingston Frontenacs to fritter away potential prosperity -- they ended up with a 6-5 overtime loss to the Oshawa Generals last night after blowing a two-goal lead in the final two minutes. To top it off, they allowed John Tavares to score off the overtime faceoff. Forward Matthew Kang had a hat trick, and his linemate Chris Stewart figured in all five goals. That should have been enough to win, no?

The late collapse combined with Brampton and Peterborough winning (the latter in a shootout over the Ottawa 67's left them in three-way tie for seventh -- not far from being out of a playoff spot in the OHL's tight (read: mediocre) Eastern Conference. Like the Frontenacs last Friday, Ottawa was stymied by Peterborough goalie Trevor Cann, who made 52 saves before stopping six out of seven 67's in the shootout. (Six out of seven 67's -- try saying that five times fast.)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.