In February 2005, only days before the NHL officially shelved its full season because of a labour impasse, a Toronto-based newspaper asked Gord Downie, the lead singer of The Tragically Hip, for his thoughts on the game. He responded: “What we want from hockey, what we look for, is life’s ideal, not its reality.”

Perhaps no rock band has spent more time meditating on Canadian sport than the Hip, the soundtrack of cold arenas and hot summer nights at the park. With the news Tuesday that Downie, 52, has terminal brain cancer, the Star examines five ways the Canadian band is tied to the Canadian obsession:

An Olympic performance

In 2002, after the Canadian women’s hockey team beats the United States on home ice for the gold medal, players are called on stage for an exclusive concert in Salt Lake City. It is a night soaked in Canadian beer and Canadian Olympians. “This is a song you might know, it’s called ‘Fireworks,’ ” Downie tells the crowd. “For all you fine athletes, and all your fine athlete families.”

They launch into it, the stage lights flashing and the Canadians dancing: “If there’s a goal that everyone remembers, it was back in old ’72. We all squeezed the stick, and we all pulled the trigger.”

An instant classic

In 1992, the band releases an album featuring a fast-moving tribute to the Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman who vanished decades earlier. Bill Barilko, whose story was unknown to a generation of younger fans, is enshrined in Canadian myth with “Fifty Mission Cap.”

As noted in the song, Barilko scored the Stanley Cup winning goal for the Leafs in 1951, but disappeared that summer when his plane crashed on a fishing trip.

“It’s more than a hockey story,” Downie tells the Star in October 1992. “It’s a Canadian story, a tragedy, really, of someone cut down in his prime. It’s as much a story of unfulfilled potential as it is hockey.”

An important letter

In May 1993, the Hip are touring the United States, but take time to write a letter to their local hockey team. The letter lands just before the Toronto Maple Leafs step onto the ice for Game 5 of their Campbell Conference final series with the Los Angeles Kings.

“Yo Mighty Leafs!” the band writes. “You guys are looking great. Destiny is with you and so is the Tragically Hip!”

The band says it has been watching the Leafs play on ESPN, and that it has refused to go on stage until the final buzzer has sounded. The Leafs go on to win Game 5 to take a 3-2 series lead. (It is their final win of the series.)

An aspiring actor

In February 2005, Downie travels to Fredericton to audition for a CBC miniseries based on the 1972 Summit Series. He is trying out for the role of Ken Dryden, the Canadian goaltender.

“I remember being corralled into the library with all my classmates to watch,” he tells The Canadian Press. “It was something I haven’t experienced before or since. Teachers and students and principals, and everyone were one.”

Downie was eight years old when Canada beat the Soviet Union. (But he does not get the role of Dryden, in the end.)

“Isn’t life acting?” he tells the CP. “I feel like I’ve preparing my whole life for this.”

A dedication

In 2004, the band releases a new album, “In Between Evolution,” which includes a song dedicated to the memory of Dan Snyder, a hockey player killed while riding in a car with one of his teammates the previous fall. The song is: “Heaven is a Better Place Today.”

Dany Heatley, his Atlanta Thrashers teammate, was driving at the time of the crash.

“Nice kid, nice kid,” Downie tells a reporter of Heatley. “There’s a lot of eloquence around that death, all the way around, on the family’s part.”

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