Not the kind of "big game" featured at left. That photo, by the way, was taken out of my office window. The doe and her daughter were about 10 yards away. Have I mentioned that I live in paradise?
No, the Big Game I'm talking about is the Grey Cup--the Super Bowl game of the Canadian Football League. Actually, die-hard CFL fans probably don't appreciate that analogy, and after watching some of the game last night, I can see why. The rules are different, which makes the winning strategies different.
Pundits this morning are saying that yesterday's game wasn't pretty. Only a little more than 1/3 of the passes attempted were completed. The losing quarterback was intercepted three times. However, as is true in the Super Bowl, what matters is who won.
The winners were the Saskatchewan Rough Riders. I had picked them over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers because my maternal grandfather's folk come from Grenfell, Saskatchewan, and some cousins apparently still live in the area. I can't name a player on the team, and in fact I was reading a mind-candy cop novel at the same time the game was on (some things just don't change), so I'm using the phrase "watching the game" only loosely here. Still, I feel a little as if I've participated, slightly, in Something Important to All of Canada.
And yes, that's the kind of rhetoric they use to talk about this game. You think Super Bowl Sunday is a big deal--you should be in Canada during the Grey Cup Extravagannnnnnza. The pre-game festivities, covered on the national morning show, Canada A.M., started on Thursday. Thursday. Yes, Thursday. The hosts were saying things like, "With the big game just over 72 hours away, fans are congregating in Toronto. And oh yeah, a lot of us are shopping south of the border, too. Oh, and there might be some kind of peace summit next week."
So, to those south of 49 who think Canada is a country with some Higher Consciousness because of the whole socialized medicine thing, think again. Canada isn't going to meet Kyoto targets, and the Prime Minister last week put the kibosh on a new international agreement about climate change. This haven for American draft dodgers during the late 1960s, the country that didn't support the U.S. foray into Iraq, has troops fighting, and dying, in Afghanistan. And oh yeah: they make a production out of football, too.
Which leaves me feeling, today at least, that the two countries are more the same than they are different. But that's today.
