"I hope the (Canadian) Olympic team loses," they said, unknown to and independent of each other.

Hey out there, hold your fire. And put away the kindling and the torch.

These guys (who pleaded anonymity on humanitarian grounds) are not hockey heretics. They are fellows who sincerely feel only something as rash as a decisive defeat in Nagano can get Canadian hockey back on track.

I'd like to think the decline can be reversed well outside an Olympic humiliation but their frustration is understandable. And it's widespread.

Canadian hockey is slipping. It is naive to think otherwise. We are losing the game incrementally and we are doing nothing about it.

Have a look at the National Hockey League, the end product of all elite hockey trends and styles. What do you see?

In general terms, you see Europeans beginning to dominate super-skilled forward roles, U.S. college players dominating defences and Canadians comprising more and more of the grinder class. There are a lot of reasons.

European kids can learn to be creative without fear of getting decked by a check until they're older. And they play more outdoors on their own, their inventiveness emerging through many fun hours on a pond or rink.

To most Canadian kids, outdoor ice is weird. And cold. And a place many parents would deem unfit for custom skates.

Look south. Accomplished U.S. Olympic team blue-liners such Chris Chelios, Brian Leetch and Gary Suter developed through the quality practice system of American college hockey. No wonder they can skate and carry the puck. They've practised it enough.

Canadian hockey players nowadays develop in spite of a system that crushes creativity. Folks with their head in the sand point to skill players such as Joe Thornton and assume the system is working perfectly. The fact is, Boston's No. 1 draft pick deserves a lot of credit for surviving the system that spawned him.

It is a system in which sports culture has no place, where the realization of individual skills is subjugated to winning. Just as in the pros, victory is everything.

In much of rep hockey, defencemen fire the puck out via a hard-around. Forwards stay in position, move the puck, dump and chase it. Nobody handles it very long.

This is one reason the NHL is serving up a lot of bad hockey these days. Another is because it can.

It's an American league now, one performing before audiences not as sophisticated as the relative smattering of Canadian fans who follow the game. Many of the new fans didn't get to see the hockey of 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago.

A lot of Canadians are irate that Mark Messier was left off the Olympic team and guys like Keith Primeau are on it. Not to denigrate Primeau's skills, but isn't he closer to what is becoming the Canadian style than Messier is?

As for Wayne Gretzky, Ray Bourque, Al MacInnis and maybe another player or two, the Nagano Olympics could represent a closed book.

They could well be the last pond players to perform for the Canadian Olympic team.

It would be fitting if Canada were to win the first open Olympic hockey tournament. But not for the two professional hockey men mentioned above.

They'd suffer the loss if the consequences meant a long and serious look at the game we call ours.