It is October 2007, and I am on a train. It is a clear, bright fall morning and Ontario looks as lovely as she ever will — cornfields so dry they nearly shimmer, forests coloured like Starburst candies before the advent of kiwi and blue raspberry. Behind me, Montreal is beginning a month-long flirtation with early winter, but down here in Upper Canada it is still a tender Indian summer, and the country looks inviting. It begs to be strolled upon, promising a pleasing warmth on the top of the head and a slight flinty breeze on the cheeks, soft unfrozen loam underfoot.

The Canadian landscape plays tricks with an American’s sense of space, for on the eyes it feels like home. The earth rolling by the train is known to me, the unassuming agrarian wonderland of the Great Lakes region, and I have seen these slight rippling hills and modest woods before. But in my version of this panorama, there are always a couple of farmhouses and a truck stop on the horizon, a persistent criss-cross of country highways, a small town every few miles and a small city less than an hour away. Here, I can ride that hour and hardly see a home or even a car. For an American, the first experience of Canada is the emptiness, even in this most densely populated part of the nation.

At this point in my life, when I get on this train, I have lived two years in Montreal, and — save for the surreal drive up from Chicago with everything I owned in the back of a rental truck — hardly left that elegant island. Canada, as a whole, is still a vague notion to me, something huge and distant and quite unexpectedly foreign. Had it not been for hockey, I might have been content to let it stay that way.

But an interest in hockey demands a certain knowledge of Canada, in much the same way an interest in wine demands a certain knowledge of France. Across this pretty, lonely land, the cold season to come is the hockey-growing season, in which the next crop of grand cru players will be raised. I am going to see the cultivation process. I am learning where hockey comes from.

It is a Sunday afternoon, and I am in Kingston. The Kingston Memorial Centre is, or was, a quaint old barn. Vintage styling, really, a scrap of classic mid-century Canadiana ensconced in a peaceable residential neighbourhood. To the front, it presents a stoic, slightly repressed face, like your grandfather who fought in the war.

The Mem Center is too small to be a major junior arena. It hardly warrants the term “arena” at all, being hardly more than a thick hallway wrapped around perhaps fifteen rows of seating, themselves wrapped around an ice slab, with a gigantic portrait of the Queen in her sexy days looking coolly down on the home net. This isn’t a stadium; it’s just a rink, a simple, efficient facility for the playing of hockey.

The age of the building shows in all its details, but none more than this: the Memorial Center has no “private” zone for players. A typical modern sporting facility is two distinct buildings grafted together, a space of consumption and a space of production. In the consumption areas, those-who-watch buy their tickets before being funneled through a liminal zone devoted to ancillary products — beer and hot dogs and pizza and poutine, jerseys and hats and t-shirts, noisemakers and programs and raffle tickets — before being deposited at their predetermined vantage points. Meanwhile, in the production areas, those-who-play are dropped by bus at a different entrance and travel via secured pathways to private changing rooms, from which they will skate-walk still other secret corridors to the playing surface. At no time in the process of creating the event can those-who-watch and those-who-play have even slight, incidental contact with each other.

We accept this, my generation anyway, on its face. We believe that players are such fragile celebrities and fans such crazed maniacs that the two must be segregated, for fear that the former be reduced to shreds of mangled flesh and sweat-wicking fabric by the latter.

Yet in the Memorial Center, there’s only one hallway for everyone: the players go to and from their dressing rooms, intersecting a line of fans waiting for the bathrooms; the visitors’ backup goalie sits on a folding chair in the aisle such that he has to shift his padded bulk apologetically every time someone needs to return to their seat. One Sunday afternoon in Kingston, I literally run into Logan Couture, then of the Ottawa 67’s, as he pushes through the crowd in full gear. He is eighteen and enormous and somewhat clammy in texture, beset by a bright and painful-looking case of acne and a faraway expression that is entirely in keeping with being eighteen. The collision is my fault. I had my head down.

Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and the Kingston fans are uniformly elderly, skeptical, and very, very familiar with their Frontenacs. It is, at this time, a bit of a sad-sack team, perennially unsuccessful, led by a put-upon center called Nathan Moon who plays with the heartbreaking sincerity of the moderately talented during their draft year, and who stands sweaty and dutiful by a taped-up backdrop in the hallway during intermission. He practices his media face for local cable while, just five feet away, unimpressed regulars bewail that the Frontenacs should come to such days, that this Moon should be their best player.

They say it is difficult to play in Montreal in a bad season, but I think it must be no less difficult to play in Kingston at sixteen, under the imperious eyes of Her Majesty and the disapproving jeers of the unsympathetic old men of Ontario.

Hockey fanaticism in Canada is a nostalgic business, but it is difficult, as a relative newcomer to the game and an American, to understand what exactly is being longed for, what precisely has been lost to the depredations of time and the NHL. Now, when I try to imagine the lost past, I think sometimes of the Memorial Centre, and the intimacy bred by tiny rinks and small towns. In most of Canada, major junior players on game day are already minor celebrities. But in Kingston, that last year in the old barn, they were — all of them, from the long-suffering Mr. Moon to the already-canonized John Tavares — just teenagers on skates, subject to more or less the same attitude as teenagers loitering in a parking lot at a suspiciously late hour. A generation ago, even half, most hockey in Canada was like this. Toronto and Montreal had their fedoras-and-furs hockey clubs, but most of the game most of the time would have been played in these chilly, homey buildings. For most Canadians, The Show would still have been a distant thing, but the stages that led to it would have been so close to normal life as to be nearly unremarkable. Not anymore.

It is early November 2007 in Ontario’s London, and I am staying in a hotel so fantastically seedy that it feels like the “seedy hotel” set from a crime thriller. For $50 cash, plus a key deposit, I get everything you could want while on the run from the police or the mob or an implacable assassin — sagging couch, stained carpet, wobbly table, and an old iron radiator that begs to have something or someone chained to it. There is a bare bulb in the one socket that has a bulb at all, and a private bathroom with a cut-out in the door that suggests no one using this room would ever want privacy from anyone else with whom they might share it.

And it’s wonderful — spacious, well-ventilated, clean enough for what it is. The room has a bed, two chairs, a toilet, a shower stall, and hot water. This is the kind of place that allows people who have nomadic or transient lifestyles to survive, and people like me to travel around watching random hockey games. The only downside is the unfortunate Toronto Maple Leafs flag hanging in a window across the street, an unavoidable view out the window from my bed, but I am in the part of the world where such things are to be expected. My only actual regret, staying in this room, is that I don’t have any cigarettes. One rarely gets the opportunity to burn holes in things with impunity, and unless management is keeping a very careful tally of charred gaps per bedspread, there’s no way they’d notice it has eight burns instead of six after I’ve gone.

A mere three blocks from this Disneyland of dubiousness stands the John Labatt Centre — home of the London Knights, and probably the biggest, shiniest, newest junior hockey arena in Ontario. I’m not against big, shiny, new arenas on principle. I was, in fact, very much prepared to like the John Labatt Centre. On first inspection, wandering around the exterior of the building and its inner concourse before the game, it seemed quite pleasant. A hockey game is not, by its nature, pleasant- it takes a lot of contrivance to make it thus. Watching hockey in one of the little old arenas is many things — viscerally thrilling, anthropologically fascinating — but it is not comfortable. My personal opinion is that the experience of watching a sport should be distinctive to the sport being watched, and therefore it’s only right that watching hockey should be a sensually punishing experience. But having spent a lot of time shivering in tiny cinderblock boxes, trying to keep my ass from going numb on slate-hard benches, even I sometimes welcome the prospect of a cushy seat.

The John Labatt Centre is definitely comfortable. In spite of its imposing size and grandiose façades, it is not an intimidating space. The interior is bland in a classy sort of way, like a high-end shopping mall. Everything is clean, well-lit, and well-marked, with space to move around without overmuch jostling, and enough concessions that you never have to venture far to find the needful snack. The chill is regulated to bearable levels. There are, if I recall correctly, cupholders.

But it is a quiet building. The scoreboard blasts the requisite metal-pop at the requisite volume over the requisite CGI-enhanced video intro, which presents the London Knights somewhere between the Terminator and Chuck Norris on the Adjusted Manliness Index. Nevertheless, the fans have the collective demeanour of people watching an early season game (which this is) on TV after a particularly rough day at the office. There is hardly a whoop or a heckle to be heard, barely even a collective murmur of approval. I have been told that London fans are quite raucous come the playoffs, but tonight there’s something ineffably depressing about the silent masses of quarter-life guys with their beers and baseball caps, slouched back in their seats while the scoreboard shrieks its Nickelback refrain. The game in London feels very far away, and the Plexiglas above the boards may as well be the screen of a television, absent the cheery comfort of a play-by-play announcer. This is an arena built to make fans comfy, and passive too.

If you want to consider Canada’s changing relationship with hockey, I submit, consider its rinks. If you are of a mind to romanticize them, don’t do it for their character, but for their scale. A small rink is a human-sized place, a social hub, a space to affirm (however contentiously) the links and bonds of a hockey-centric society. An arena is a theatre, where people sit and watch a show contrived and arranged to amuse and excite, in a wallet-opening sort of way. A rink makes a community. An arena makes spectators.

The process that produces the John Labatt Centre is the process that is sending the game south. Since the time of the Original Six — four of which were, and are, American teams — hockey has grown exponentially, becoming bigger, bolder, brighter, more exciting, more lucrative. Like all professional sports in the modern age, it is not just a diversion or an interest, but a spectacle. The pursued audience is not those cranky old bastards who can remember the skating stride of guys who grew up, played, and retired before your daddy even watched hockey, whose great-uncle was the Great Bun Cook, and if you’re too ignorant to know who Bun Cook was, then how can you say you know hockey? Those people will come to games anywhere. No, even in Canada now, even at the major junior level, where the performers are hardly more than children, hockey is an entertainment product designed to appeal to a mass audience of spectators looking for a pleasant evening out. Owners pin their business plans on this appeal, just as city councils from Oshawa to Nashville pin their hopes for downtown revitalization on it.

This evolution of hockey as a product is what kills any hope for NHL hockey to be played and consumed mostly on Canadian soil. A product needs a market, and Canada is undeniably a smaller market than the ravenous pit of consumptive need to the south. But if you’re going to lament the state of the professional game, don’t blame entirely the NHL or the owners, who in the end are only doing what is logical given the situation. Lament, rather, the rise of capitalist modernity, the transformation of sport into work and spectacle, and the fading bond between the performing and the performed for. Lament the death of the Mem Centre, uncomfortable though it was. Lament the cupholders.

Copps Coliseum is the arena equivalent of blunt-force trauma, a huge, heavy thing that feels as if it were built for people ten feet tall. It is a style common to American Hockey League interiors — unfussy concrete in long lines and sharp angles. Copps is not so different than the buildings in Portland (Maine) or Manchester (New Hampshire), the latter a city that reminds me of Hamilton in no few ways, although it is smaller and features less water.

Copps might dream of hosting an NHL team, but for now it settles for Montreal’s farm club, the Hamilton Bulldogs. It’s one of the few places in Ontario that feels friendly to me — a diasporic community where everyone wears bleu-blanc-rouge, the lottery giveaway is a round-trip journey to Montreal by Via Rail, and I know the players by name. Then as now, goaltender Carey Price is backing up Jaroslav Halak, albeit incidentally and on a smaller stage. At this time, everyone is certain that Price is the Next Big Thing; Halak is a skinny, nervous-looking thing with a limp glove hand who — it is hoped — might be a competent Bunny Larocque to Price’s butterfly Dryden. I am disappointed not to see “the good goalie” play.