When does Joe Fan realize the people he’s cheering for hate him? Or as Bruce Springsteen might sing, “Is that you baby? Or just a brilliant disguise?"

Unfortunately the five percent who think they run modern Canada don’t count Olympic blessings they way they used to. A prime minister in a hurry to call an election during a pandemic— that he’s abetted— sees the roll of honour quite differently.

There have long been a few NHL father/ son duos. Gordie Howe’s boys and Bobby and Brett Hull spring to mind. But they were not as pervasive in the league as they are today. Witness the just-passed Draft that saw a host of familiar family names getting new surnames.

It is time to ask if NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is still engaged in the work of having his league taken seriously or whether he’s playing out the string. What should have been a great NHL week was tarnished. And he had the power to stop most of it.

Enjoy stronger/ higher/ faster/ more liberal the next two weeks. You’re probably witnessing the end of the Games as we knew them and the birth of something that takes marching orders from Woke politicians. Pro tip: You won’t like it.

In the annals of athletic bad-assery you’ll have to go a long way to surpass the bare-chested, profanity-laden media performance of Stanley Cup champion Nikita Kucherov after his Tampa Bay Lightning dusted off Montreal in five games.

The winners are clear. It’s likely a loss for those athletes in other collegiate sports whose programs were kept alive by the flood of money from football and basketball. That especially means women’s programs which cannot support themselves in their current iteration based on TV ratings and attendance.

One would like to take the league and their snoozing media at their word that they will do better in covering these abuse stories in the past. Sadly, there is little reason to believe this contrition after so many false starts in the past.

Fans looking at the 2019 Raptors NBA title over wounded Golden State— Toronto had its main weapons playing—will no doubt find an echo in this year’s postseason as the stars on the favoured teams are decimated by injury. Add in Covid-19 absences. The postseason feels like Saving Private Ryan as wounded players are cut down.

Those who even whispered at any connection between Christian Eriksen’s collapse and a possible vaccine were immediately buried beneath an avalanche of sputtering outrage from vaccine boosters. Depending on who is talking the vaccines are impeccable, a gift from God arrived to end the pandemic. And deniers were lower than single-cell creatures. This comes from the high priests of healthcare whose prescription to stop the virus the past 15 months has been a medieval mix of masks/ lockdowns/ social distancing/ wait for a miracle.

The PGA Tour is no doubt under great pressure from its sponsors and political allies to keep promoting Casedemic deception. The message of change on PCR testing in America and Canada has to come from where it started: with the public and private ®Health experts who’ve dissembled and deceived since early 2020 to deflect their mistakes and shift blame to the naughty public.

The vagaries of tanking for success were never more evident the past week as the poster children for draft manipulation, the Edmonton Oilers, were waxed in four straight games by a decidedly unglamorous Winnipeg Jets club in the first round of the 20212 playoffs. While Toronto blew a 3-1 lead to the Habs.

In the days before the media surrendered its integrity in favour of blaming Trump, Doug Ford and Jason Kenney, government exaggerating death tolls would constitute a major scandal worthy of leading every newscast. But these are different days. Different indeed.

It’s clear a segment if the population will never recover from the spectre of the virus, the uncertainty of its arrival, the ability to fight it off with immune systems or even vaccines. The Church Ladies of infection still hold high court with their disaster scenarios and their public shaming of the infidels who believed all along that you weren’t going to get sick standing on a beach for strolling through a park.

The testing numbers we see today reflect conditions four-five weeks ago. Yet Health® experts and their media slappies want you to believe you can rectify the past by locking down golf courses a third or fourth time. That shutting down the Men’s League on Wednesday will alleviate the pressure on ICUs. Or keep schools open.

What do the NFL and NHL share? A hard salary cap. The pressure of staying under a strict budget has changed the way teams build champions. In today’s win-now culture, the pressure of managing a salary cap means that you must play your prospects and draftees on entry-level contracts before they get to the big bucks.

Why the push? Simple. The product is now global, not national or regional. Fans around the world, who support the sport with TV, digitalis and logo revenues, only want to see the star teams and star players. Teams are brands, and their merchandise is sold across the world. The Super League was going to be Broadway and everyone else regional theatre.

Lockdowns have had little, if any, positive effect so far on the virus in North America. But like baseball hitters determined to hit into the shift, the Health Experts® are going to keep employing the lockdown. Hey, who are you going to believe? People hitting .200 on all the major calls of the pandemic or your lying eyes?

Despite MLB’s pretension to a national platform it has become a regional sport, defined by strong rivalries but absent any compelling national voice. While there are wonderful players like Mike Trout and Mookie Betts, none have a national profile à la LeBron or Tom Brady. Its population base is greying at a rapid clip. In the wake of the All Star farce, something has to change.

To say that spring of 2021 is tainted is an understatement. Just as our appreciation of the spring sports rituals has been blunted by the virus, there is another nagging issue with many of our favourite pastimes. As we wrote last October as the Dodgers polished off the World Series, subtlety seems to have been lost in baseball. (And no, we don’t mean MLB interfering in Georgia state politics.)