For Canadians, the only sport that really matters is hockey

VANCOUVER - If there is a more interesting question in Vancouver this month than how Canadians will react if their hockey team wins the gold on home ice, it is this: How will they react if their team doesn't?

Understand, the entire nation rejoiced when Alexandre Bilodeau won Canada's first-ever gold medal on home soil in the moguls. An estimated 7.3 million Canadians watched him on TV, millions more tuned in for his medal ceremony, and more celebrated in the street.

Consider that moguls is to hockey in Canada as lacrosse is to football in America, and we can only imagine what the celebration would be like if Canada won a gold on home ice in the sport, as a recent Coca-Cola ad here suggested, that Canadians invented and still own.

"Oh, this is huge," said Dan Melanson, 56, of Burnaby, British Columbia. "This is Canada at its best. This is our game. We win the gold and we can still proclaim to be the best in our game, hockey."

Melanson, like most of the people packed into Canada Hockey Place, wore a Team Canada jersey Tuesday as his team beat feisty but undermanned Norway 8-0 on the first day of men's hockey at the Olympics. Melanson also wore face paint in the shape of a maple leaf on one cheek, and of the Canadian article "Eh" on the other.

That's "Eh" as in "Aay," not "Eh" as in "who cares?" Canadians turned Hockey Place into a cauldron of red Tuesday, as they cheered the most routine save by Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo with a call of "Luuuuu," and cheered even NHL enemy Jarome Iginla, throwing hats on the ice after Iginla scored his third goal of the night. (A scoring change later took away one of Iginla's goals.)

Americans have the Miracle on Ice, the 1980 victory in Lake Placid. Canadians have the Miracle Under Ice, the 1992 gold in Salt Lake City, where a Canadian icemaker placed a Loonie -- the Canadian one-dollar coin -- under center ice to provide a target for puck drops. The Canadians won their first gold in 50 years there, and team GM Wayne Gretzky recovered the Loonie and donated it to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

"I don't think there is a comparison that would do it justice in the U.S.," said Scott Burnside, a hockey writer for ESPN.com. "I guess it would be if you took the fan base for the Red Sox or Yankees, and they lost the World Series -- and then you multiplied that by the population of an entire country. That's what it would be.

"If they lose to the Americans on Sunday, it will be a major catastrophe. That's what is going to be interesting about this team in this tournament -- the wins will be exaggerated, and the losses will be exaggerated. It will be interesting to see how the players respond to that. Because here, it's monumental.

"Once they get into elimination, how the fans will respond, well, it will be enormous. There's no other way to describe it."

My analogy would be this: Imagine if everyone in the United States was cheering for the same team in the Super Bowl, and Americans didn't care much about baseball, basketball or hockey.

You can't walk a block in downtown Vancouver without seeing five Team Canada jerseys, with three of them bearing Sidney Crosby's name, even though Crosby plays in Pittsburgh and was born in Nova Scotia, about as far away from Vancouver as a Canadian can get.

Team Canada has home ice, the most stars, the most depth, an all-star coaching staff including Jacques Lemaire, and faces the most pressure.

Canadians will be devastated if their team doesn't win the gold. Polite, understated, yet devastated.

"If it doesn't happen, well, God bless the team that wins," Melanson said. "Because they're going to have a tough time beating us."