Some sports rivalries are generational. Others are about an underdog fight or national pride.
Canada’s hockey victory over the United States on Thursday was a bit of both. Against a backdrop of taunts by President Trump about annexing Canada and the looming economic threat of 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, a lot was symbolically riding on the game.
[Read: Trump Says Auto Tariffs Coming Apr. 2]
“Canada needed a win, and the players beared that on their shoulders,” Jon Cooper, Canada’s coach, said after the game. “This one was different. This wasn’t a win for themselves. This was a win for 40-plus million people. The guys knew it and they delivered.”
The game capped off a round-robin tournament called the 4 Nations Face-Off between Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States. It was the first international tournament since the 2016 World Cup of Hockey to feature some of the National Hockey League’s best players representing their countries.
The championship on Thursday took on geopolitical consequences unfamiliar to Canadian sports fans. After Canada lost the first-round match, there was a sense of urgency weighed by heavy stakes and a responsibility to prove something very important to the world.
Instead of the usual electric anticipation before sports matchups between Canada and the United States, this championship’s buildup held a bitterness. Social media was abuzz with insults in both directions. My group chat plotted how many Canadian flags would sufficiently offend at a sports bar. Bygone were the playful pregame bets between world leaders.
Despite being an infrequent sports watcher, the tone felt unusually familiar. The intensity reminded me of the hostile soccer rivalry between Albania, my family’s home country, and Serbia. The two nations have a fraught political relationship and have been involved in wars against each other.
On the flip side, Canada and the United States, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has remarked in recent weeks, fought alongside each other as close allies that share a friendship unparalleled on the global stage. That was, of course, before Mr. Trump’s threats of annexation.
“You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game,” Mr. Trudeau wrote in a post on X after the nail-biting victory.
Thursday began with more needling from Mr. Trump that Canada should “someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State” led by “Governor Trudeau.”
[Read: Canada as the 51st State? In Electoral Terms, Trump’s Idea Favors Democrats.]
Typically, Canada’s matches against the United States are about sport supremacy and pride, equally so in the women’s hockey league and in soccer and basketball, said Dave Bidini, a Canadian musician and author of 13 books about hockey. That’s changing.
“This geopolitical climate adds an entirely new depth, I think, to these kinds of games and probably will for the next four years,” Mr. Bidini told me. The last time he recalled feeling heightened political tension during an international hockey event was during a match in 1972 between Canada and the Soviet Union. Canada scored the winning goal with 34 seconds to spare. As a child, Mr. Bidini feared the Soviet Union would consume his country if the team lost.
“Looking back, I think how utterly absurd that was,” Mr. Bidini told me before the game on Thursday. “But that was the climate of the times, and tonight is the closest it has come to mirroring that.”
“I hope Canada wins because I think it’ll quiet the noise a little bit,” he added, referring to Mr. Trump’s threats.
As for other noise, sports-watching venues across Canada were raucous. At a packed sports bar in Toronto’s east end, fans around me booed the United States. They erupted in jubilation after Canada’s first two goals by Nathan MacKinnon and Sam Bennett, and into enthusiastic cheers after three impressive saves by the goaltender Jordan Binnington. The viewers more than once broke into the melody of “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Pizza Pizza, a Canadian fast-food franchise, put out ads during the game for a 25 percent “reverse tariff” discount on pizza.
Connor McDavid, who played alongside the fellow national treasure Sidney Crosby, scored the winning goal in overtime.
Then came the finale: the national anthem.
Matthew Roberts, a spectator who was sitting not far from me, belted out the first words of “O Canada.” Others quickly joined.
“I sang ‘O Canada’ as loud as I could to get the crowd going,” Mr. Roberts said.
As exhilarated fans filed out of the bar, Mr. Roberts told me he normally isn’t the most patriotic or invested sports fan, but the atmosphere that night called for it.
Trans Canada
Pierre Poilievre, the front-runner to become Canada’s next leader, has become a darling of the American right, writes Nori Onishi, The Times’s correspondent in Montreal.
A Delta flight from Minneapolis crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday, with the plane going belly-up on the tarmac. All 76 passengers and four crew members survived. The airline offered passengers $30,000 each. And amid the recent string of crashes, here’s what passengers should know about airline safety.
Banff is featured in the latest edition of 36 Hours, a series by the Travel section that offers a weekend itinerary complete with dining recommendations, hotels and activities. (In case you missed it, I recently visited Quebec City for the series.)
The Canadian model Winnie Harlow announced her engagement.
John Giorgi, a software engineer and research scientist based in Toronto, believes artificial intelligence tools are helping coders, not leading to their extinction.
Vjosa Isai is a reporter and researcher for The New York Times in Toronto.
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