Jim Kelley

Jim Kelley writes regularly on the NHL for Sportsnet.ca and can be heard on Primetime Sports on the FAN590.

Memo to some headline writers, more than a handful of columnists and far too many broadcasters looking to “capture the emotion” of Canada’s loss to the United States in the world junior championship this week:

The definition of “heartbreak” is as follows: great sorrow, grief or anguish; an alternative is very great sadness and emotional suffering, grief or intense suffering caused by loss of a loved one (especially by death).

For me, that would be the kind of ongoing suffering the Sanderson family, now a full year into mourning the death of their son, knowing full well it was the result of a hockey fight in a senior league game has had virtually no impact on the powers that be in the National Hockey League.

For me, that’s the kind of suffering families endure when their son or daughter signs up to serve their country and comes home in a flag-draped coffin, and with the very real question as to whether or not they died in defence of freedom or because politicians made something less than a full commitment to a war that they knew would be very difficult to win with anything less.

A hockey game played by kids who did their absolute best and fell one shot short to an opponent that set its sights on beating a team and a country that they know is the standard by which all hockey-playing countries are measured? Sorry, that’s not a heartbreaking loss; that, in my mind at least, is something to be extremely proud of.

Think about that for a moment.

The success of the Canadian system and the many young Canadians who did find ultimate success at this tourney, forced the United States to change its entire approach to hockey at this level. USA Hockey went from sending a collegiate all-star team picked by a handful of bluebloods, who for years felt the game was there for them to rule, to developing select teams at every age level and then blending them with rising stars in the collegiate system (many of whom benefited greatly from playing with those select teams) into a team, a team dedicated solely to winning a game against Team Canada in the most difficult of circumstances imaginable: on Canadian soil.

Prior to this week that has happened only once before – 2004 - at the gold-medal level and you could count all U.S. medals on one hand. That one gold, for all intents and circumstances, came about via an accident of hockey, a bizarre goal that no one, on either team, could honestly say they saw coming.

Then there’s the “heartbreak” for the individual players.

I’ll admit that a loss at that level is hard, likely the hardest loss those young men have ever experienced given the weight of expectations for a sixth consecutive gold medal, AND the expectations that they can and must do it on home ice. But more than ever I subscribe to the theory that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and in that regard I point to one Marc-Andre Fleury lying face down in the Canadian goal after his errant clearing pass went off a teammate and back into his net giving Team USA the 2004 championship.

A mere five years later that same Marc-Andre Fleury, having apparently spent every waking moment of his hockey life improving his game, jumps across the crease to make a stunning save on Nicklas Lidstrom, arguably the greatest hockey player of his time, and snares the win for Pittsburgh against Detroit in Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup final.

Fleury, who left the World Championships with a silver medal around his neck and the weight of a nation on his shoulders, now walks with the elite of hockey’s elite, a Stanley Cup champion goaltender with a ring on his finger and the unbridled respect of his Cup-winning teammates, everyone of whom knows they wouldn’t have won that Cup or even reached the final were it not for Fleury’s game-saving efforts in goal.

And for the record, it’s time to end the endless conversations regarding how the Canadian kids might have won gold if some of their young stars, now making their way as substantial contributors in the NHL would have been on the team. So what, they weren’t.

They didn’t turn their back on their country; they were honouring their contractual obligations to NHL teams who chose not to release them. They could have delayed the start of their NHL careers to play in the tournament simply by not signing those contracts. They didn’t and their employers held them to them. There’s no crime in that, there’s no shame in that and there is no justifiable reason for projecting them into a contest that they could not participate in.

It’s like that horribly lame argument that Canada could ice two or even three Olympic teams if the rules allowed and that any one of those three could win gold. If that’s a valid argument, how come Canada’s No.1 team failed to win a medal in two out of the three Olympics it entered using its best pro players?

The truth of this tournament is like the truth of any other; you play with the team you have, not the one you imagine or the one you want because you didn’t win with the one you have. The sooner the sporting media realizes that, the better off all the kids in all the tournaments throughout the world will be. In the most recent junior tournament, that was the best team Canada could put on the ice. That was the best performance those kids could muster. They didn’t slack off, they played every game to win and they won all but one and that one happened to be against a team they had beaten just a few days before.

There’s no shame in that. There’s no “heartbreak” in giving all you have and coming up one win short. That happens in hockey, it happens in life and all you can do is pick yourself up, dust yourself off and walk out of the arena with your head held high.

Those Canadian kids did that, they played their game, they played it to the best of their ability and they gave an effort that on most nights and in most games, would be enough to win. That the Americans matched that effort, that the Americans got one more save that led to one more goal, well good for them because it’s not as if they weren’t trying either.

True they didn’t come to the game with the weight of a desperate nation longing for a win. In truth, most people in the United States don’t even know their hockey program has an elite under-20 team, let alone how it got to that level or even that it takes a world of intensity and mental and physical toughness just to step onto the same ice as a Canadian elite squad.

Even those who did knew they would have to scramble just to find the results of the games in their local newspaper, and most of those who wanted to see it would have been shut out were it not for the NHL Network putting the games on cable or satellite in their market.

One could argue that worked to the Team USA advantage in that they had next to nothing to lose and a fair share of notoriety to gain should they put together a winning effort at just the right time. That they did that bodes well for their program, but it takes nothing away from Canada.

In 2012 in Buffalo, Canada will still be the team to beat. The only difference being that in a given year, the U.S., like Russia or Sweden and only a handful of other countries in the world, might rise to the level of matching Canadian greatness and on those occasions might once, every five or six years, beat the world’s best.

There should be no “heartbreak” in that regard for Canada’s kids, there should be nothing but pride.

A standard has been set, a standard the rest of the hockey-playing world has for years been trying to emulate.

U.S. junior coach Dean Blais spoke to that after the championship game.

“We played Canadian hockey,” Blais said. “We played gritty. We blocked shots. We back-checked … You learn from the best.”

If I were a Canadian, I could live with that. I’d be disappointed in the loss, but proud of being a product of a system that annually produces the bulk of the world’s best hockey players.

There should be no great sorrow in thinking that, not even close.

In truth, most people in the United States don’t even know the hockey has an elite under-20 team, let alone how it got to that level or even that it takes a world of intensity and mental and physical toughness just to step onto the same ice as a Canadian elite squad.