On the eve of another World Cup of hockey, the first in a dozen years, it's worth asking: Was rebranding the Canada Cup – and losing out on its important legacy – a mistake? It happened back in the mid-1990s, when the NHL and the players' association – in an eager desire to broaden the scope of what they perceived as a regional tournament – rechristened the event the World Cup.
In soccer and other sports, the designation World Cup generally translates into big dollars, captive audiences and breathless anticipation of a once-every-four-years' event.
By contrast, a hockey tournament named the Canada Cup just sounded too regional. It mattered to the Russians when they were still known as the Soviets and to the Czechs and Slovaks when they competed internationally as a single entity, but would anyone in the United States ever care about a tournament named for its neighbour to the north?
Not likely. And so, it had to go.
Looked at purely from the marketing side of the equation, the first World Cup was a dream result.
The United States lost the opener in Philadelphia, but then went up to Montreal and won twice to take home the hardware. Objectively, it was the second biggest moment in American hockey history after the Miracle on Ice, but it gained only modest attention when it happened; and outside of the hard-core hockey world, was quickly forgotten.
Organizers skipped the World Cup in 2000 but held it again in 2004, with Canada winning. Few remember many of the details of the victory over Finland because of the looming player lockout.
Then the World Cup quietly disappeared into the ether, a product of too much strain on the top players and a desire to limit best-on-best competition to the Olympics.
You'd be hard-pressed to find many people who can conjure up one of those, "Where was I?" moments to describe anything that transpired in a previous World Cup.
Compare that to the Canada Cup, where the memories flood back. In 1981, the Russians obliterated the Canadians at the Montreal Forum and then tried to smuggle the trophy home, in an old hockey bag, Alan Eagleson and Valentin Sych, the president of the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation, wrestling for it in the corridor, a Keystone Kops moment for those of us who witnessed it.
In 1984, Paul Coffey broke up that two-on-one, Mike Bossy scored at the other end, Canada came off the ropes after a dismal round-robin to eliminate the Soviets and then ultimately defeat Sweden in the final. In 1987, there were those three 6-5 barnburners, Mario Lemieux's shot heard round the country in the waning moments of the deciding game, ending what might have been the greatest international series of all time. The Canada Cup had an aura about it, and a cachet among its stakeholders – players, coaches, fans, organizers – that the World Cup has never been able to match.
Not yet anyway. So here we are on the cusp of its resurrection and once again, the impetus for getting it out of mothballs is to promote the NHL product. In 1996, they tried to spread the word by playing World Cup games in Stockholm, Helsinki, Prague and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, as well as in Ottawa, New York, Philadelphia and finally Montreal. This time around, it's all centred in Toronto – eight teams, six featuring the most prominent hockey-playing nations, two others odd hybrids.
One is an under-24 team, cobbled together because this is an NHL showcase and thus gives them a chance to show off this pleasing array of the next generation of players – Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Jack Eichel, Auston Matthews and the rest. It's a curious blend of Canadians and Americans, but it could work – and create buzz.
Even though they've come up in separate, competitive systems, there is ample precedent in hockey for disparate groups to succeed. The 1980 U.S. Olympic team had to overcome the suspicion the Minnesota players had for those from the Northeast. The 1984 Canada Cup had to work through the antipathy and suspicion the New York Islanders stars had for their Edmonton Oilers counterparts.
History – and precedent – shows it can be done. With Team No-Fixed-Address, officially known as Team Europe, it might be harder. They have an able and motivated coach in Ralph Krueger behind the bench and they will maintain a professional posture for the event because Zdeno Chara, Anze Kopitar and the rest are nothing if not committed professionals.
But a professional posture is a lot different from the heart-and-soul, blood, sweat and tears we've come to associate with best-on-best events that really matter. That's what the Canada Cup was.
Maybe they can never put that genie back in the bottle, now that the NHL is just one big happy international family. Nowadays, Russia's Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin are among the faces of the league. A generation ago, their predecessors were the faces of the enemy.
But it's nice to think what would have happened if they'd just left well enough alone and see what sort of memories a continuous line of Canada Cups, played every four years, might have wrought.
Now, of course, we'll never know.