Losing to Canada not as big as losing to the Commies -- or the Dutch

I know people who will be very upset that the U.S. men's hockey team lost its semifinal match to Canada at the Sochi Olympics.

It wasn't much of a surprise. Canada has always been good at hockey -- it's the national game up there -- and while its origins go back centuries to Europe, the modern game was invented in Montreal in the 1870s.

And while four of the original six teams in the National Hockey League were in the U.S. -- Detroit, Chicago, New York and Boston along with Toronto and Montreal -- the league was dominated by Canadian players. Just as U.S. athletes back then grew up playing baseball or football, Canadian kids were all on skates for as much of the year as possible.

Hockey in the Rockies

 In this country, once you got to the Mason-Dixon Line, you stopped seeing rinks.

If you tried to name the greatest hockey players of all time, it would be a while before you got to one born in the United States.

So it's their game, and when they play the U.S., they usually win. The two greatest American victories ever in the Olympics both came against the USSR, in 1960 and 1980, and were both played in the United States.

It was easy in those days to get worked up about those games. I mean, hey, it was the Commies.

It's tough to get too riled about playing Canada. I mean, they're just like us, even if they do say "aboot" instead of "about." Their animals are pretty much the same as ours, and except for Quebec, we came from the same parents.

Canada celebrates.

So we lost, 1-0. They'll play on Sunday for the gold and we'll play on Saturday for the bronze.

My guess is more Americans will get worked up by the comments by Jillert Anema, the Dutch speed-skating coach. He told the press that the reason Americans didn't win more medals in winter sports was that we waste too much time on silly sports.

"You have a lot of attention for foolish sport, like American football," Anema told CNBC. "You waste a lot of talent, athletic talent, in a sport where it's meant to kill each other, to injure each other. (The U.S.) is so narrow-minded, and you waste a lot of good talent in a sport that sucks."

Hey, good thing he can make it home from Sochi without coming anywhere near the U.S.

***

I'll tag this on today because I've been thinking about it and because it's probably not worth a full entry.

When I was growing up, my family was not really into amusement parks. We did go to Freedomland twice in the early '60s, but I think my folks must have seen an educational value there.

This one's in Vancouver.

So I don't know how old I was when I went on my first roller coaster, but I do remember when and where I rode my first Wild Mouse.

If you're not familiar with the Mouse, it's in the roller coaster family, although it's much more compact, with smaller cars and a lot more horizontal action and smaller vertical ups and downs. The Mouse went really fast and the turns were nearly all at right angles. Right when you thought you were going to fly off the end, the car did a 90-degree turn.

Get the picture?

I was 12 the first time I rode on one, and it was at the wonderful Ohio State Fair in Columbus. It was my first time on the Mouse, but my last time at the Fair. We moved to Virginia the following winter.