NASA calls it ‘Go fever.’

This is the rush to reach an arbitrary goal while ignoring signs to slow down. They identified it as a culprit in the Apollo 1 fire. Twenty years later, it was blamed for the Challenger explosion. Another generation on, and it played a role in the Columbia disaster.

It is a deeply embedded risk in all complex systems, and exponentially more so when vanity is involved.

Right now, Markham has such terrible ‘Go fever’ it ought to lie down for a few years until the hallucinations pass.

An NHL-ready stadium in a bedroom community sprung on the banks of Hwy. 407 won’t work for a variety of reasons — the primary one being there isn’t an NHL franchise to put in it.

You could unpack a narrative that ends with another team parked 30 kilometres from the Air Canada Centre. (First principles: You can’t create one where Markham arena frontman Graeme Roustan ends up owning it. A Texas civil court found in 2009 that Roustan committed statutory fraud in a rink dea.)

Maybe Rogers wants to push Bell out of their increasingly fractious partnership in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. Maybe they’re willing to pay a steep premium to do so. Maybe Bell could be convinced to leave, in return for an assurance that MLSE will endorse (or, at least, not oppose) their goal to bring a second team to the GTA. Maybe Bell decides that a proposed $325 million Markham arena fits their plan — though starting out as tenants rather than owners is financially dubious. Maybe Roustan doesn’t start dropping clogs into the gears of this process.

Maybe after years spent resisting turning the league into a fully Canadian corporation with a few U.S. branch offices, Gary Bettman about-faces on the key mission statement of his 20-year tenure atop the league.

A lot of maybes, and each one of them followed by a more plausible ‘not.’

Even were all this to come together, it will not work for a simple reason — Markham is a place rather than an idea.

Where the NHL (and every other league with the same sweaty-palmed expansion problem) has faltered is in believing that a population cluster equals a community.

This is not to suggest that the residents of Markham have no fellow-feeling, but they do not comprise a sufficiently vibrant stand-alone.

Markham is one part of Toronto. Toronto already has a team.

In order to support a team — and by ‘support’ I mean embrace rather than do just enough to keep alive — a community must create the mechanics to lure a team from the bottom up. There has to be a noisy, widespread desire from real people, because by the end of this process each of them will be picking up part of the bill. This is the Winnipeg model.

If it starts out in bean-counting and dissent, it’s doomed.

By that measure, an NHL team in Kitchener makes decent sense. An NHL team in Hamilton makes a little more. Those cities are their own ecosystems. Hamilton has proven that it will do just about anything to support a faltering local franchise on the basis of heritage and romance. And yet, we still have the rotting corpse of Copps Coliseum to provide us with the memento mori of all the money that will die in this deal.

This has to be the basic understanding between a city and its new team — we’re in this for love, and the sort you pay for.

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What does Markham want? It doesn’t want to pay taxes to build the thing. That’s sensible, but a successful first date doesn’t end with an argument over the cheque.

Maybe there is enough hockey spill-off in Toronto to float a robust second team. Maybe 905 can rally around a club in the exurbs. Maybe Mississauga and Scarborough feel they have more in common with a place they’ve only seen as it flashes by on the 407 than they have with downtown.

More maybes, followed by more flashing red ‘nots.’

What is pretty clear is why Markham city council is so hot to undertake this plainly ill-considered deal despite all the bad omens — because it’s a Great Big Project.

“The (Ed. Note: as-yet nebulous ) support from our developer community has been outstanding,” Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti said over the weekend , speaking in the broadest possible terms of the deal. “They are stepping up again just like they did for other projects like the YMCA and the expansion of the Markham Stouffville Hospital.”

You can almost hear the sneer — just like the YMCA. Nobody builds a legacy on top of a daycare and a spin class. Only a sports arena suits men and women of vision.

This is where the fever takes hold. All the focus is on the day they unveil the finished building (i.e. the launch). Whether anyone can survive the day after is a detail left for the next mayor, or the next charlatan who arrives on a magic carpet peddling NHL dreams.

Whenever theoretical money and gullible politicians intersect, there will always be someone willing to take advantage. That’s arriviste arithmetic. What’s astounding is that the people of Markham have allowed it to get this far. We have a sideshow at City Hall. They’re the ones with the genuine crisis in civic government.

But there’s always the counter-argument of maybes. Maybe it can work. Maybe it will get built. Maybe even for the price they’ve suggested. Maybe the NHL ends up there.

The only maybe that matters: ‘Maybe’ is not a business plan.

Correction - Dec. 3, 2013: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the arena will be located on the banks of Hwy 404. As well, the article should have made clear that while a Texas civil court found in 2009 that Roustan committed statutory fraud in a rink deal, he has never been convicted of fraud in a criminal case.



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