Boo-Hoo: How Cry-Babies Are Making A Huge Fuss About Something That Shouldn't Even Exist In The First Place

It's playoff season in the NHL, and that means ''more of the usual'':

1. The Montréal Canadiens are in them and the Toronto Maple Leafs are watching them on TV trying not to think of the number ''1967''
2. The San Jose Sharks will choke
3. The Cup will not come back home to Canada
4. Montréal fans will boo the Star-Spangled Banner, the opposition's best players, and their own team's players who aren't giving maximum effort
4A.Too many people will get their panties up in a bunch about booing the opposing team's national anthem and will call Montrealers ''classless''

Case in point, right here.

First of all, in the modern-day NHL, where games are played on two continents (the season starts in Europe nowadays, remember?) and has teams consisting of players from as many as 15 different countries, the singing of Canadian and American national anthems before a game is pretty retarded.

When more than half a team leaves for Europe in the summer, you can't make the point that they're playing for their adopted city as if it were representing a country; the best of them play for their own countries whenever they can, be it at the Olympics, the World Championships, the World Cup, friendly tournaments... all occasions where it makes sense to have national anthems, because countries are pitted against one another.

Current-day NHL? Not quite.

Now, assuming you still go ahead with singing them, one anthem is yours, the other is the enemy's. Except in the province of Québec, where it can be argued that both anthems are actually ''enemy'' anthems, but I digress. So one's ''good'', the other's ''evil''. Montréal is known accross the league as having the most intimidating home crowd, with Philadelphia being a close second. Why wouldn't they add a little bit of intimidation by showing their colours right from the start?


It's funny that during the past year, while the health care debate was raging in the U.S., all you'd hear from those opposing health care reform was how bad ''the Canadian system'' was, how we're nothing but a bunch of commies that have to wait in line and die of common colds, that we're half-civilized retards, that we're the cousin with no friends your mom forces you to bring along when you're playing with your friends...

Oh, but if we boo your national anthem, you start crying? Call us classless?

We define class.

We let you have our best doctors (they make up between 15 and 25% of your medical corps), we give you our entertainers (apart from rappers, they're now half of your charted music and our actors earn a third of your highest-grossing films).

We can drink beer without becoming ready-for-combat overweight apes, yet we don't mind when you cross the border to drink here legally at age 18 and behave like idiots. You won't see us piss in the middle of the street in NYC at 4AM, but you'll see Americans doing it here on Crescent Street.

Americans always piss on us, and all we do is a little harmless booing.

Boo-hoo. Boo you.