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The game of hockey first emerged in Canada well over a century ago and is often described as a reflection of Canadian society (Metcalfe 1987). A popular discourse of hockey is one in which Canadians are passionate about ice hockey, claim ownership of hockey as "their" game and that hockey is quintessentially Canadian (Gruneau and Whitson 1993). Hobsbawm's notion of "invented traditions" (1983) can be applied to the game of hockey in Canada which has a long set of practices governed by accepted rules, ritualism and symbolism, and where hockey serves to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour and implies continuity with the past. Thus, conversations and practices of hockey are viewed as deeply embedded in Canada's national culture and identity. Gruneau and Whitson (1993) note that the game of hockey is then considered as part of the way Canadians live and make sense of their lives and, consequently, it is an important part of the Canadian collective memory and acts both as a myth and allegory in Canadian culture and an imagined national culture. Robidoux (2002) argues that hockey has become a metaphoric representation of Canadian identity. While hockey originated in Canada and was played by Indigenous Peoples (Holman 2018), the game equally was used for assimilation purposes by Euro-Canadian settlers (Paraschak 1997) and served to erase Indigenous presence (Bennett 2018).
Beginning in the late 1900s to the present, popular writers have written books, including children's books, celebrating and romanticizing hockey in Canadian culture such as, for example, Beardsley's 1987 book, Country on Ice; Gzowsksi's 1981 book, The Game of our Lives; Dryden and MacGregor's 1989 #1 best seller, Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada; and McKinley's recent It's Our Game: Celebrating 100 Years of Hockey Canada in 2017. Symbolically, in 1994, hockey was legislated as the national winter sport of Canada (National Sports of Canada Act, 1994), solidifying it officially as part of the imagined national culture and a point for identity formation. Meanwhile, over the past half century in Canada, the playing of amateur and recreational hockey has shifted from outdoor ponds and outdoor community rinks to indoor hockey arenas with artificial ice, where the game is now very organized (Johnson and Ali 2016), and this has made the sport...