ABSTRACT
The supplanting of hockey with baseball as a major motif in Canadian collective memory, even if just slightly, represents a shift in the constructed notion of this Canadian identity. Twenty-years and one month later, on 24 October 1992, a somewhat similar moment of national importance occurred in Canadian sport, but its legacy is less clear. The central and most obvious means by which Canadians construct their collective memory is in the recollections and accolades that appear and reappear in the national media. The National Hockey League, of course, has long been an American-dominated sporting organization in which Canadian teams have had success, but as a media product it is nearly inconsequential and largely ignored in the United States. Far from being mindless or jingoistic, much of Canadian nationalism is both cosmopolitan and progressive. National identification, like team identification, necessarily requires a process of inclusion and exclusion, of perpetually situating ‘us’ against ‘them’.
