I love living in Canada…except when it’s hockey season. I’m part of a rare breed in this country: the sports zealot who doesn’t worship the Stanley Cup; a sort of heathen in the holy land.

My favourite fights involve Goodenow and Bettman, not Domi and Brashear. This past season-that-wasn’t satisfied me far more than any that had ever been played before.

Don’t get me wrong, I like hockey. The game functions on solid sport principles similar to the way soccer, basketball, water polo, and lacrosse do. Hockey is a pretty good game, but I don’t love it the way others do. So what’s my problem? Why is it that I seethe with resentment at the prospect of another winter with Bob Cole and Harry Neale?

Because in Canada, when there’s hockey, there’s nothing else. It’s actually quite a remarkable phenomenon.

At ten in the evening, if you try switching from TSN to Sportsnet to the Score, one thing will remain the same: hockey blather. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they’re playing in the preseason or the playoffs-if someone is holding a stick and wearing skates in this country, then cameras will be there and heads will be talking.

I don’t think that I would mind so much if the hockey season occurred in a sports vacuum, as baseball does. If there is only one legitimately interesting league to broadcast, then networks can go ahead and overindulge all they want.

The problem is that hockey is in just the opposite situation. It coincides with the NBA and NFL seasons, as well as college and university football and basketball. At any given moment in the late fall, winter, or spring, multitudes of sports stories and highlights yearn to be told and shown. For Canadian audiences, most of them will get buried deep within a Sportscentre broadcast or will not get told at all.

Instead, at the top of every broadcast we’ll hear (yet again) about how the Leafs still haven’t figured out how to play in the new NHL.

It took the lockout last year for me to realize just how delightful sports coverage could be in a market not over-saturated by hockey. Desperately trying to fill the void left by its marquee event, Canada’s three all-sports channels were forced to televise other leagues.

For the first time, scores of NBA and college games frolicked on our airwaves. On Saturday nights, I was no longer subjected to Leafs games when I wanted to see my friends.

One of my buddies was even converted to both football and basketball in the absence of hockey. I wasn’t the only beneficiary of this media migration.

Sadly, this cornucopia of sporting delights was interrupted in July by the signing of a new collective bargaining agreement. Now I can only longingly look south to a land where my dreams are a reality; where the NHL inspires so little enthusiasm that it is outdrawn by arena football, poker, and bowling, and consequently had to give away its broadcasting rights to NBC basically for free.

To make matters worse, when Sports Illustrated neglected to devote a cover photo to its NHL preview, it unofficially demoted hockey to the status of NASCAR. Nevertheless, thanks to its deal with NBC and a lucrative new contract with the Outdoor Life Network, American hockey fans won’t be left out in the cold (they do all live in Minnesota, after all).

Americans, at least, seem to realize that hockey is one sport worthy of coverage among many. Canadians constantly seem to critique the United States for its egocentrism in all things (usually justifiably), but when it comes to sports it is we who parochially cannot look beyond the game at which we most excel.

For fans with a broad palette of sporting tastes, Canada is a repressive environment in which to watch, whereas America, at least in this regard, is the land of the free.

So tonight when you sit back and relax in front of your beloved hockey, spare a thought for those few of us who suffer to please your whim. I’m going to have to go back to checking the internet for college football updates.