Florida Panthers centre Aleksander Barkov (16) shoots the puck against Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Joseph Woll (60) during overtime in Game 3 of the second round of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Amerant Bank Arena.Sam Navarro/Reuters
For a long time, hockey has been the background hum of Canadian culture. It’s there, but not so loud that you’d notice it.
Every once in a while whatever’s going on in the game rises above the general hubbub – almost always at an Olympics – but not for long, and never in a way that causes friction.
For twenty years, the rest of us weren’t doing much and could have used some distraction. But hockey kept quiet. No Canada-based NHL juggernauts. No champions.
So, of course, just as the country starts slipping sideways into a national unity crisis, here comes the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. the Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup final.
Obviously, there’s a round-and-a-half of playoff hockey left to go and nothing is certain yet. Except it is. You know it, I know it and Danielle Smith knows it. It’s in the air.
The Leafs lost on Friday night, but just barely, and only because they decided to take the second period off. For a lot of this series, the defending titleist Florida Panthers have looked like one of those sped-up crowds in a Benny Hill skit chasing a Leaf on an odd-man rush.
Edmonton looks even sharper – like a smarter, less anxious version of last year’s finalists.
If everything was going great for Canada, the Leafs would blow up before the final. That’s their function. They are a civic penance, reminding Torontonians that there are places in the world that would kill for their biggest problems to be a bad drive across downtown at nine in the morning.
Toronto has a tendency to grandiosity. The Leafs keep the city’s head screwed on crooked.
Now that things are getting shaky, the Leafs have done the most chaotic thing possible – finally gotten good.
None of us is ready for where this is headed, and the players least of all.
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It’s going to start out with the realization that this is happening. Leafs vs. Oilers for the first time ever – the Battle of the 21st Century Jinxes.
Think of all the think pieces – a Canadian team guaranteed to win a Cup, and it’s either going to be from the least liked part of the country, or the other least liked part of the country. The separatist movement may be dead in Quebec, but this might be the rock rolling moment it needs.
As soon as the final is set, the politicians will begin to horn in on the action.
Alberta Premier Smith will start because she’s a strike-first type by temperament. Last year, when the Oilers played the Stars, she made a bet with Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas. Whoever lost had to eat the other side’s local beef.
Abbott filmed the losing meal. Rather than start at the edge, he ate through the centre of a bone-in ribeye, like a psychopath.
This was fun stuff back when Texas and the rest of them didn’t want to run off with Alberta, leaving the rest of us to heat our homes with the butane found in lighters and cough medicine. But still – we should have known.
This time it won’t be fun because break-ups are always terrible, even the ones that don’t happen. Especially the ones that don’t happen.
Maybe Smith can bet Ontario Premier Doug Ford for all of Ontario’s nurses? The losers give their RNs a first-class train ticket and wish them good luck on their new adventures. The people of that province will have to manage with pre-op care from emergency veterinarians. It would be in keeping with the steak idea.
If Smith says something and Ford says something – and neither of them can resist saying things – then Prime Minister Mark Carney will have to say something, and whatever he says will be wrong. He’s just that guy. Everybody else will be trying not to inflame the situation, pretending there is no hockey and the Toronto Maple Who?
Canada has only a few unique cultural ticks, and one of them is making every tiny thing worse in the long run by refusing to argue about it now.
People will try to draw the players into it and then it gets awkward. Imagine Connor McDavid trying to articulate that while the confederation sustains us all, Alberta’s issues can be fairly addressed while also respecting the treaty rights of the province’s Indigenous population.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s really his bag. He’s going to say, “I don’t follow politics.” And then everyone else in uniform will do the same thing.
But that’s not going to be good enough for a nation determined to fight about the National Energy Program again. This won’t be the 4 Nations. The players can’t chant ‘our game’ and get people to leave them alone. Not picking a side is picking both sides, which makes everyone angry. And though hockey players love to knock each other’s teeth out, they’re not prepared for that sort of violence.
So everyone else will read opinions and motivations onto them. That will be happening in newspapers and on Reddit threads and other online places nice people don’t go, but unhinged people do.
By Game 3 of an Oilers-Leafs final, it will be West versus East for real, with things said that cannot be taken back and feelings hurt in lingering ways that won’t be forgotten. It’ll be great for Sportsnet, but maybe not so amazing for Canada.
If the Oilers win, then it’s the tea leaves that prove the independence movement has fate on its side. If the Leafs win, then whatever it says in the Book of Revelation about that happening will happen. It’s bad juju either way.
You can’t stop it. All you can do is prepare yourself, maybe by becoming a Canadiens fan. Then next year Ottawa can play Montreal in the Cup final, even though that’s impossible. Then hockey will force us to either settle all our national grievances, or we become a nation of divorced statelets who still live together because none of us can afford the amount of house we’re used to on our own.