The stands are crowded, but nowhere near full. The upper tiers are shrouded in funereal black drapes, like an English country manse with its far wings shut up. In this game, Maxim Lapierre will score two goals in ten seconds, a franchise record that he still holds. The celebratory noise will barely be enough to echo.

It is disorienting to be in a place like Hamilton, or London, or Kitchener, and realize that it is by local standards a major population center. America is so thoroughly settled, north to south, coast to coast, and in nearly all points in between. There are desolate places left in the Western deserts, and a convincing sense of emptiness to be felt while driving through the vaster prairie farmlands, but my country is mostly a filled-up place. Canada, though, is just plain... vacant. The distances between one thing and another, from one person to another, are wide; the places of congregation are few. Canadians even have (in my subjective experience) a wider bubble of personal space than Americans, as if the entire society is used to having extra room. Hockey is one of the few things that seems to pull Canadian things and people closer together, with a subtle gravitational force.

I have no doubt that Hamilton could support an NHL team, pulling as it would from Toronto and the many middle-sized cities in the region. But there is no escaping the fact that much of Canada, like Hamilton, has the feel of AHL country. Indeed, it is only the willingness of Canadian fans and corporate sponsors and media to flock from kilometres and kilometres around for the chance to see and support NHL hockey that makes the place at all viable.

Consider: formally speaking, Hamilton and Atlanta have roughly similar populations, around half a million people in their cities proper. But Atlanta is just the city centre that supports a broad cluster of suburbs and absorbed towns that raise the overall metropolitan population to over five million. Hamilton is the suburb, and even taken together with its own hub — the largest city in the entire country — the population is only around six million. A team in Hamilton would be profitable, instantly, in its first season, but those initial profits would be close to the utmost achievable. Hockey in the southern United States may be a hard sell, but it has an inherent appeal to the speculative and the entrepreneurial. The introduction will always be rocky, but the victory, for someone tenacious enough to achieve it, has the potential to be tremendous.

Canada has six cities with metro populations over one million. Guess which six they are.

The United States has fifty-two. The NHL hasn’t even tried half of them yet.

Everyone has their own notions of hell. Mine is very much like Oshawa. There used to be a town there, one can tell, but it seems to have been drowned in Toronto’s eastward sprawl. What feeling of town remains seems to be suffering a major depression, the kind that can’t bear to get out of bed before noon. It doesn’t help that this is the ugly side of winter, a sky like dingy cotton batting looking down on tire-packed slush.

Leaving the train station, I trudge toward downtown. It is trudging kind of weather in a trudging kind of city. I feel like a character in an early twentieth-century existentialist novel, as though I have always been trudging these sidewalks and will trudge them unto forever.

When downtown appears unexpectedly, I am cheered. The best thing about Canadian downtowns is that they all have used bookstores, and I stop for a while to browse in a friendly looking one before continuing on. I pass the General Motors Centre and make a turn, heading in the bustlier-looking direction in search of accommodation.

I have, at this point, not yet grasped the salient aspects of Oshawa.

Downtown ends as abruptly as it began. I enter a universe of strip malls, plazas, and shopping centres; block after block until there are no more blocks, only the lonely spaces between one outpost and the next. The stores are often set far back from the road, lumpen tan things surrounded by hectares of parking lot and token landscaping. There are no people visible who are not envehicled.

By the time I realize that the malls have no end, I have wandered far from the GM Centre, and it is dark. I stop in a pizza place and ask if I can use their phone to call a cab. My taxi arrives late and confused (when you are in a strip mall within scores of virtually indistinguishable strip malls, it is somewhat difficult to convey an exact location). I explain that I need a cheap motel, and the cabbie explains that the budget accommodations aren’t in Oshawa, they’re in some neighbouring city down the highway. I say, “Whatever, take me.”

It is an unexpectedly long drive. On the way, the driver asks what I’m doing here. I explain that I’ve come to see a hockey game.

“You’ve got Leafs tickets?!” he asks, with a sudden and unexpected enthusiasm.

“No,” I reply. “Generals.”

“Who?”

“The Oshawa Generals. The major junior team. They’re playing Peterborough tonight.”

“Junior team? Really?”

“Really.”

“Huh.” Pause. “So, you like hockey?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

This is the wrong answer. One does not express an affection for hockey anywhere in the Greater Toronto Area unless one is prepared for the inevitable follow-up. Which comes, in due course. First, a twenty-minute rant about the Leafs: the management (stupid), the players (slow), the ownership (greedy, bureaucratic), the past (glorious), and, naturally, Wendel Clark (God). Second, the summation: the team will never improve because it doesn’t have to, because it makes money even in failure, because its games sell out to corporate sponsors and season ticket holders. An ordinary guy can’t afford to take his kid to a game anymore. Cue violins.