'Is a Canadian team even allowed to win me anymore?' The imagined thoughts of the Stanley Cup
This week saw the beginning of the Stanley Cup finals, which sees the Edmonton Oilers in contention to potentially become the first Canadian team since 1993 to win the NHL championship trophy.
In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup. Or, as its more commonly known, the Stanley Cup.
Life comes at you fast. One minute you're a donated silver cup being fought over by toothless Canadian amateurs fresh from a shift at the dockyards. The next, you're a heavily trademarked corporate laurel that spends most of its time around American millionaires.
I've been to the White House so often I've got my own Secret Service code name. I've been filled with hot wings and Kristall liqueur more times than I can count. There are times I catch myself spelling 'colour' without the 'u.' I stared in the mirror for several minutes at the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup inscription on my bowl. How often do I forget it's even there.
I'll be frank; I didn't know Canadian teams were still technically able to win me. I figured Canada had lost a war or something, and as a condition of the surrender they had to forsake access to their most treasured cultural object.
That's how these things usually go, right? That's why the Mona Lisa, an Italian cultural treasure, is in France. It's why Egypt's Rosetta Stone is in the U.K.
So to learn that the Oilers merely have to win some hockey games to get me back is quite surprising. I thought my return to Canadian soil could come only at the conclusion of some devastating internecine conflagration.
People ask me if I still keep in touch with the other Governor General sports trophies: the Grey Cup, the Minto Cup, the Jeanne Sauvé Ringette Cup.
The answer is, no. The last I heard from any of them was when the Roland Michener Tuna Fishing Trophy tried to borrow money. Do I think I'm better than them? Yes. As much as I respect the emerging sport of Dragon Boat racing, I would controversially contend that the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Dragon Boating Cup doesn't inspire the heart of young athletes in quite the same way as I do.
Nevertheless, there are still times I think wistfully of the simple yet satisfying life of the Grey Cup. Does Tom Cruise envy his humble siblings who never left upstate New York?
I would remind people that I continue to spend a disproportionate amount of time with Canadians. It's just that these particular Canadians live in the United States, work for U.S. companies, are paid in U.S. dollars and have married Americans (blondes, mostly).
Is it not fitting that these ambiguous Canadians should be rewarded with me, the very icon of shifting and ambiguous identity. How much of me is really the 'original' Stanley Cup. At what point, when so many of my parts have been stripped off and moved to a museum somewhere, do I cease being what I once was?
Do I fear what would occur were I to once again be in the possession of a Canadian team? I have so often been in the hands of cities who were immune to my powers. Where the Stanley Cup parade has been little more than an ill-attended circling of the arena parking lot. What happens when this spell is broken?
Like any major trophy, I know I hold immense power and influence. Cities have burned on my account. Fortunes have been lost. Tears have been shed. TVs punched. A people has been bound in the darkness for a generation. What happens when they see light for the first time?
Dear Diary: Inside the thoughts of Canada Post workers considering a strike
Dear Diary: The imagined thoughts of Justin Trudeau
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