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Tonight officially marks the end of the Canadian Holiday Season as the World Junior Hockey Championships draw to a close. It has been a long road for the Canadian team, having narrowly avoided elimination by edging the European triumvirate of hockey: Latvia (16-0), Slovakia (8-2) and Switzerland (6-0 and 6-2: we had a re-do of the first game just to drive the point home).

Of course, Canada was also pitted against a young upstart nation of colonial rebels and anti-monarchists on New Year’s Eve… Apparently the Yanks did not learn their lesson from 1812, and decided to come back for more. The result was largely the same (except instead of burning down their capital city, we took a more subtle approach this time by narrowly escaping with a shoot-out victory). For those that missed the shoot-out, it’s worth a watch…

Tonight’s gold medal game will be a re-match of the New Year’s Eve battle. Before the puck drops, however, we would like to have a few words with our friends south of the border:

Hi Team USA - how’s it going? You’re looking well. Say hello to your mother for me. So, what’s the deal? You looked pretty quick out there in the last game. A little too quick, some might say. What the hell are you doing?! You know the deal - we get hockey and curling, you get unparalleled dominance in every other sport. That was the agreement. I thought we made it pretty clear.

Look, we admittedly flew a little too close to the sun in the early 1990s by toying with your national sport with our back-to-back World Series championships, but let’s not kid around - there were no Canadians on the Blue Jays at the time. Our Dominicans simply bested your Dominicans. That doesn’t breach the terms of our arrangement. Besides, we made up for it by “letting” you win our most recent international basketball showdown…

Look, Team USA - we need this. It’s cold up here. Really cold. We haven’t seen the sun in weeks. To make matters worse, we’ve got nothing to do up here except speak French and abuse our universal health care system. We’ve got one road, 3 cities and declining fish stocks. Throw us a freakin’ bone, USA. Please. Besides, 99.9% of your country doesn’t even know this tournament exists - they won’t care that you settled for silver… Conversely, if we lose our nation will death-spiral into chaos. Look, if this is what we do after we WIN the first round of a playoff series, imagine what happens when we lose a gold medal game:

Thank you for your time and consideration. I trust we have an understanding…