Driving through the pouring rain, through a continuum of shopping malls and hotel chains and restaurants anyone not starving would be wise to avoid, I am thinking about home, about a frozen driveway, and leather hockey gloves that did nothing to ward off the sub-zero cold, and copies of Chatelaine magazine shoved under hockey socks for shin pads. And I realize how ridiculous it is to imagine — as I always have — that such reminiscences will keep the US from swallowing a little country’s affection for a sport that, when played well, is about as exciting as a sport can get.

A memory. There was a winter — I’m guessing 1961 — when I was at my cousins’ in Dundas, Ontario, for a Saturday-night family dinner. It got dark early in December, and by five o’clock everything outside was turning black and to a hard, glistening white. My uncle had flooded the narrow, level driveway — layering sprays of water from the garden hose over the gravel night after night in a solitary, devoted advent. And he did a good job, because when my cousins and I put on our gear and stepped from the side stairs onto his ice, we glided across a surface that was even smoother and harder than we’d hoped. The light, all the more dramatic for being artificial, fell from nearby street lamps and from the windows of the two houses that flanked the strip of ice. I remember the breakaway rush of winter air. Skating up and down the driveway seemed an improbably fantastic turn of events — like a dream in which you find a wing of the house you hadn’t noticed before.

I think it only happened that one year — an occasion when the score climbed well into the double digits. Our wrists were chafed red with the cold, and our fingers were curled numb around the shafts of our Sherbrooke sticks, but when we were called in for dinner our bodies were chugging like furnaces. We sat in the back room — the kind of space you don’t see much anymore. Untouched by both interior design and insulation, it was a friendly clutter of sofa and card tables and piano and newspapers and board games and television — all kept at a slightly higher temperature than the driveway. (My aunt was never one to pay for heat, so long as the cold wasn’t actually life threatening.) Joining the cbc’s telecast somewhere near the end of the first period (which, for mysterious, unquestioned reasons, was the way Hockey Night in Canada worked in those days), we ate our hot dogs and potato chips, and drank our milk, and watched the game. That’s what everybody did.

Unless, of course, they lived in the southern United States, where they were hunting squirrels. Or objecting to desegregation. Or watching The Andy Griffith Show. Or something. America, so Canadians are sometimes surprised to realize, really is another world, and the more south you go, the more “other” it gets. Childhood memories of frozen driveways and Murray Westgate’s Esso commercials don’t have much resonance past a certain point on I-95. Nor, I begin to think, does reason. As a respite from Reba McEntire and George Strait, I am listening to Rush Limbaugh, and while I wouldn’t want to compare Limbaugh’s politics to Don Cherry’s (there is a gulf between a right-wing American and a right-wing Canadian that reaches from wing tip to wing tip of the Republican Party), I began to wonder if they didn’t both flap around in similar belfries of their respective national psychoses. Cherry isn’t dangerous, and he isn’t evil — which means comparisons to Limbaugh can only go so far. But both personalities operate in a realm where overbearing confidence is precisely balanced with an absence of anything that might be construed as precision of language. Limbaugh’s views on health care possess the same outraged vacancy as Cherry’s on fighting in hockey.

But having remotely comparable resident lunatics is a tenuous connection for two nations to have, and it doesn’t help much with the loneliness a Canadian sometimes feels travelling in America. It’s like knowing a big brother who doesn’t know you. As I drive, I recall that when the Obama administration was beginning to shift its military attention from Iraq to Afghanistan, a member of a cnn panel referred to “the token” Canadian force that was already there, and none of his colleagues saw any reason to point out that there have been 145 token Canadian deaths in Afghanistan since 2002. The indifference to Canada by what is still the earth’s commercial, financial, military, and media centre can be a dizzying downward spiral — especially if you are driving to something as Canadian as a hockey game somewhere just north of Miami.

n the case of the BankAtlantic Center, home of the Florida Panthers, it’s entirely possible that nothing was there before 20,000 seats and a sheet of ice were put in place. I’m not certain the swamp was dry. There may be a downtown Sunrise — it’s just that I never found it. It must be where the restaurants are. There is, however, no shortage of food at the arena, and I was hungry enough to fully enjoy a pizza, a hot dog, and — in a nod to good health — a Diet Coke. And it was while I was watching the game between the Panthers and the Philadelphia Flyers that two things about hockey in America became clear to me.

The first is that the nhl will no more get rid of fighting than stock car races will get rid of crashes. Fights are too gleefully imbedded in the American appreciation of hockey for the league to consider seriously the implementation of Olympic rules. I’m not sure Canadian fans are any less keen on brawls than Americans are. It was Don Cherry, after all, who pointed out that nobody goes to get popcorn during a fight, and nobody, so we are told, is more Canadian than Don. Perhaps it’s only that Canadians are not quite so officially overt in their enthusiasm for punch-ups as is the nation that now owns the sport. Canadians tend to downplay the role of fighting, even wondering aloud from time to time whether it reduces an often-beautiful game to a tawdry entertainment not far removed from professional wrestling. Americans, on the other hand, do not need to worry about something as abstruse as the dignity of hockey. They may not have hockey in their dna, as advertisers keep telling us we do, but this gives them the enormous advantage of being able to assess hockey without their view being obscured by the claptrap of national identity that so confounds the Canadian perspective. Americans see hockey for what it is: entertainment. They are thus not inclined to question something that an arena full of paying customers so clearly enjoys. A booming chorus of Judas Priest’s “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll” is a popular musical selection on arena sound systems when fights break out on hockey rinks in the US.

But fights are no longer the mere eruptions of temper that for decades were what distinguished professional hockey from adulthood. Now they are mostly set pieces — often expected by both teams, and orchestrated to send a message, or retaliate for some calumny. In March, while I was sitting in the BankAtlantic Center, the Panthers’ left winger, David Booth, dropped his gloves and took on the Flyers’ captain, Mike Richards, as payback for an open-ice hit in October that had given Booth a concussion and a forty-five-game layoff.

It was like a duel. Or, if you’d prefer a more familiar frame of reference, grade seven. “I just wanted to get it off my chest,” Booth said. “It wasn’t cheap or anything. I just asked him if he wanted to. He didn’t have to give me my shot.” Making up in fervour for what was lacking in spontaneity, they got their dukes up. It seemed a little silly — and a little bit staged — to me. I don’t believe that in a real fight the pummelling stops when one combatant, like a hog-tied calf, is flipped to the ice. But such are the rules of engagement when it comes to the outbursts of violence that the nhl, unlike any other professional sports league on planet earth, seems unable to control. And anyway, the crowd loved it. The Booth-Richards set-to occurred two minutes and forty-five seconds into the first period. It was the third fight of the game.

The second thing that becomes obvious about hockey in America when you spend a little time at arenas in Sunrise, and Nashville, and Glendale is this: it’s not going anywhere. The nhl, and the nhl’s owners, are about as willing to allow a Canadian to pry a professional hockey franchise out of the United States as Charlton Heston was to let gun regulators have his Winchester. Jim Balsillie, the co-founder of rim, who wanted to move the Phoenix Coyotes from the Jobing.com Arena in Arizona to the Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, learned this the hard way.

I live in Toronto. Being a Leafs fan feels like being held in suspended animation for a trip to Jupiter — but however distant the wake-up call may yet be, a Leafs fan is what I’d call myself. And it didn’t seem likely to me that competition an hour down the qew was going to hurt the local franchise; if losing for four decades hasn’t done the Maple Leafs any harm, I couldn’t see that anything would. As well, I grew up in Hamilton, so I was all for the Hamilton Coyotes. But it wasn’t going to happen.

The nhl’s southern expansion was not so much into a specific latitude as it was into a stratum of consumption. The thick, wide, lucrative target for success in America is the temperate middle: the deep, unquenchable marketplace of family restaurants, family shopping, family entertainment, family values. The nhl’s American hockey arenas reach out to embrace exactly this midriff.

There are many ways that non-Americans visiting America can respond to America. They can enjoy it, abhor it, worry about it, or envy it. They can join it, or, like Canada, they can pretend they haven’t. But the one thing never to do with America is underestimate it, and the hockey arenas in the southern US are a case in point. There is nothing peripheral, modest, or uncertain about them. They are poured concrete palisades, and escalators, and lineups at concessions stands, and private boxes, and (nhl-operated) souvenir shops, and giant-screened scoreboards, and vip areas, and milling crowds who, between periods, wear the optimistic if slightly fatigued expressions of people who think they are going to really have fun any second now. More to the point, American hockey arenas are so woven into a local tapestry of hotels and shopping malls and cinema complexes and restaurant chains and parking lots and retail outlets and bars that it was going to take a lot more than Jim Balsillie’s stubborn eagerness for the nhl to send a franchise north. He might as well have tried to reclaim Molson Canadian from Coors.

For obvious reasons, the nhl doesn’t like to leave any holes where its ambitions were. It doesn’t like to give the impression — to politicians, to chambers of commerce, to banks, or, for that matter, to the bare-tummied dancing girls at Bridgestone, or the cheery attendants at the Absolut Bar in the BankAtlantic Center — that things in America might not work out. Things don’t, of course — not always. Even in the US. The many, many For Sale signs I’d seen in my drive across the Florida interior attested clearly enough to that sad fact. But all countries have their myths, and none is defended more fiercely than America’s. Hamilton didn’t have a chance.

he weather was cold and miserable in Arizona, which was just as well. Had I been poolside at the Hampton Inn, I might not have been in my room, at my computer that Saturday afternoon, and had I not been at my computer, I might not have noticed that the game that Saturday night against the Anaheim Ducks at the Jobing.com Arena in Glendale started at six o’clock.