Can the Edmonton Oilers solve our national hockey crisis?

Open this photo in gallery:

How many years ago was it that the Stanley Cup stopped being a local problem and became a Canadian problem?

Eighteen or so. Around the last time the Oilers made a final.

Back then, in quick, miserable succession (ellipsed by a cancelled strike season), three Canadian teams lost three finals in a row. That’s when it began to occur to people that this wasn’t entirely the fault of whatever clown college ran the team in your town. This was a national emergency.

They say that in a crisis, the best thing to do is most often nothing. If that’s true, we are the Carthusian monks of the international community. Canada does nothing better than anyone else.

Aside from annual handwringing in the press, no effort has been made to fix our hockey problem, especially by the people who work in hockey. If anything, they’ve made it worse.

But it’s in the way of things that the wheel is always turning. Eventually – unless you are from Toronto – it lands on your spot. Now we’re back with another chance.

On Sunday night, the Edmonton Oilers put their foot on a very good Dallas team. Dallas is the sort of team that wins Cups nowadays – starless, situationally vicious, great goaltending, plays in Texas. It’s possible that the Dallas players’ neighbours don’t know what they do for a living. These guys are playing with house money the minute they start training camp.

The Oilers are the other sort of team – weighted down with huge talent, so-so goaltending, plays in Alberta. If the players want to escape the noise for a few hours, they need to put an isolation chamber in an underground bunker on a plot of land they bought in the Arctic. If these guys lose a charity game in August, it’s a disaster.

Teams like the Oilers don’t make Cup finals any more, but this is the way change happens.

People started to worry the last time the Oilers lost a final because they had until then been such reliable closers – six finals; five Cups.

But the guaranteed winners had been the Wayne Gretzky/Mark Messier Oilers. The Ryan Smyth Oilers didn’t have quite the same aura.

Nowadays, Messier is slugging for the New York Rangers and Gretzky is struggling to make a single cogent point on American TV. The glory days of the Oilers franchise feel as ancient as the Peloponnesian War.

Any bar conversation about Canada’s inability to perform in the playoffs eventually comes around to a theoretical discussion about what measures you might personally take if you found yourself in the situation.

If it was just you and the Winnipeg Jets, would you root for them? Nothing silly. Nobody needs to know. But on a lonely night in front of your television, would you find yourself succumbing?

The Jets are easy – sure. The town really cares. Team’s never won anything. They’ve never bothered anyone.

I believe you could say with some assurance that a plurality of Canadians would like to see the Winnipeg Jets win a Stanley Cup.

Ottawa? Okay. Not a terrible idea. Again, it hasn’t exactly been bogarting the country’s sporting glory. And God knows that city could use it. Sure. Ottawa, too.

Vancouver? Okay, now it gets tough to reach consensus.

Calgary? Didn’t they just win one (in 1989)?

Montreal? Everybody knows that the one who started a drought can’t end it. Then it’s not a drought, it’s a streak.

Toronto? Nobody wants that, least of all Toronto. If that happened, what would Toronto talk about?

Then there’s Edmonton.

It isn’t the perfect pick – by our low standard, it’s already spent too much time at the national hockey buffet – but it is a compromise choice.

Gretzky’s echoes are still resounding in the U.S. and elsewhere. No NHL team says ‘Canada’ quite as profoundly to a non-Canadian audience. If Edmonton wins, people outside this country will call it a Canadian win. What people outside Canada think is what matters to Canadians.

The better argument for Edmonton is Connor McDavid, the perfected Canadian athlete.

We like our megastars humble and self-effacing. That streak remains unbroken. From Howe to Beliveau to Orr to Gretzky to Crosby – it’s 75 consecutive years of humility and self-effacement.

McDavid may be the humblest of them all. He’s so humble that unless you are in the midst of watching him being interviewed on TV, you could not say with any certainty whether or not he speaks.

If Edmonton loves McDavid, everyone everywhere else in the country at least likes the guy a lot. He is pure ability, apparently untroubled by ego or self-interest.

During nine years of crushing expectation and subsequent frustration in Edmonton, he has never had a dark moment in public. Not one single hissy fit. Not even a cross word. It is a titanic and ongoing act of self-control.

You may not like the Oilers. If you aren’t personally connected to Edmonton, you should not like the Oilers.

The Oilers are not likeable in the same way the Canadiens and Leafs aren’t. All those teams are too self-referential. There’s always going to be someone telling you how they were there before you, and care more than you do, and could do a better job than the current GM (though that last bit is probably true, because anybody could). If you aren’t born to it, it’s not for you.

But you can’t not pull for McDavid. If he fails in his career, then Canada has truly failed.

For this to be the premier hockey country in the world, Canada must have the premier hockey player. The same way Argentina would have blown a national project had Lionel Messi never gotten his World Cup, Canada cannot allow McDavid to retire without a Stanley Cup and a gold medal.

We can argue just about everything, but some things should be an easy consensus. When it comes to the national sport, our best should be the best. If you accept that, then you know where your rooting interest lies.