The NHL's return to Winnipeg is all about bringing the game back to where it truly matters.
If you grew up on the prairie, where the National Hockey League was something that came 2D by TV -- not 3D in person -- you get it today.
If, at one of the first professional hockey games your father ever took you to, you remember Bobby Hull end the pre-game warm-up at centre-ice, flipping World Hockey Association pucks high into the stands as the kids scrambled for them, you understand what this means.
A seventh Canadian team is a feel-good story for the rest of Canada. For Winnipeggers, it's more than just chicken soup.
It's like getting a little piece of your soul back.
"We are," said the man most responsible for this, co-owner Mark Chipman, "excited beyond words."
The headline here is pretty simple: The NHL Returns to Winnipeg. But the story underneath is far more complex.
It is as much about the long road back for a Canadian city, and the ultimate, initial failure in Gary Bettman's southern expansion. It was inevitable that -- out of a pool that includes Florida, Tampa, Dallas, Nashville, Carolina, Anaheim, San Jose, Phoenix and Atlanta -- at least one would fail.
And when it did, that the NHL would realize the obvious: there are more die-hard hockey fans in any one neighbourhood in Winnipeg than you'd find in the entire city of Atlanta; more hockey DNA in Brandon than the entire state of Georgia.
This is hockey's heartland. A place where the NHL team won't have to queue up behind the NCAA, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, NASCAR and the PGA to sell tickets.
This is Canada, where the game is played at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, with breakfast at the Tim Horton's drive-thru and a practice that ends before the winter sun has come up.
Guys like Jonathan Toews (in my books the consummate hockey player) come from places like Winnipeg. With all due respect to growing hockey markets in places like San Jose, Nashville and Dallas, they don't come from there.
Now, we could spend the next few paragraphs on sober reality. On the size of the local economy; the number of seats at MTS Centre; the longevity issues of a team that may not be able to spend to the cap; what happens if the Canadian dollar dives again; etc...
We could embolden the vitriol slung by angry writers over how NHL commissioner Gary Bettman handled himself at the press conference to announce the team. Or re-shape the history of a city that lost the Jets in 1996 because it lacked the foresight to build a modern building (like Edmonton and Calgary did), and thus, no one in town was willing to take on ownership (like in Edmonton and Calgary).
But can't we just take the day to celebrate a city that got its team back?
This is less about Bettman and Atlanta than it is about a deserving Canadian city that worked like heck to earn its second chance. A city that positioned itself as the NHL's only option, played the game with far more skill and class than Jim Balsillie did, and waited patiently for the inevitable: a Sunbelt market whose owners wanted out, in a city where new ownership simply did not exist.
"Canada," Bettman admitted on Tuesday, "we know is the heart and soul of our game."
You may argue how genuine that statement is from the man who said it. But you can never dispute this: the words are true.
So it is what so many Canadians have said all along, this shift from peach trees to outdoor community rinks. It is the National Hockey League, after days spent at a spot on the lake where the fish simply don't bite, hoisting anchor, firing up the outboard, and moving to fish where the fish are.
And with that move comes a sentimental return to Portage and Main, the Palomino Club, Rae and Jerry's Steak House, and Dancin' Gabe.
"It is nice to be back in Winnipeg," said Bettman, "after all these years."
Yes, it is nice. Very nice indeed.
