rmacgregor@globeandmail.com

In some ways, the two junior teams that hate each other most are also most alike.

The United States and Canada tied 4-4 at the end of that remarkable New Year's Eve game in the World Junior Hockey Championship, Canadian barely winning in the shootout.

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The young players are the same age and roughly the same size; their coaches say they have similar speed, similar styles of play. There is even a sponsored scheme here, mercifully one that appears to be falling flat with the crowds, to come up with a jingoistic Canadian chant - Eh! O! Canada-Go! - to match the obnoxious U!-S!-A! of Olympic encounters between the two North American neighbours.

But there is a difference.

More than half the American junior hockey players are going to college. There are three players from the University of Wisconsin and one each from Boston College, Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, St. Cloud State University, University of Denver, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of North Dakota and University of Notre Dame.

On the Canadian side, all but one player is playing major junior hockey in Canada - the lone exception being Alex Pietrangelo, who left Canadian junior hockey this fall to play for the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League.

That makes a clean sweep for Canada - every single player coming out of the junior ranks.

While seven of the American youngsters are playing in the Canadian junior leagues, there may in future years not be so many. A new push is under way to persuade American kids to forego Canadian junior hockey - the most traditional route to the NHL - and stick to college hockey, which is increasingly producing players that reach the same goal.

The newly appointed head of College Hockey, Inc., is Paul Kelly, most recently the capable head of the one Canadian-based institution that is more "dysfunctional" than Parliament: the NHL Players' Association. Kelly was whizzed last summer by this self-suffocating union and it may well be that the 'PA's loss is college hockey's gain.

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Kelly's grand plan is endorsed by Émile Thérien, the respected past president of the Canada Safety Council, who was himself once a Canadian junior with St. Michael's College School in Toronto but who left for a scholarship to St. Lawrence University. Thérien's son, Chris, also went the college route, Providence College, before moving on to a successful NHL career as a defenceman with the Philadelphia Flyers.

"The record speaks for itself," says Émile Thérien in what some Canadians will take to be sacrilege. "The benefits offered by U.S. college hockey far outstrip what major junior hockey has to offer: the opportunity to get a free education, a much better environment to enhance and develop one's life skills, the opportunity to play and grow in an environment that is less stressful and intimidating, characterized by less travel, fewer games and far more practice and development time." Thérien says if it were possible to assess the "happiness quotient" of players from both systems who do not go onto to NHL careers, the college kids will have fared far, far better than those who put their future in a single basket that only rarely reaches its hoped-for destination.

He also argues that those who choose the college route have more choices as to where they would go. A drafted Canadian child is essentially "owned" by a business operation years before that child reaches the age of majority, with the businesses allowed to trade and sell the youngster without the child or his parents having any say at all. Many have called this practice "child labour," something Canada officially disdains, and yet those who fight such an archaic system, as the Lindros family did years ago, are considered, well, unpatriotic when it comes to the national game.

This may change. One Hockey Canada committee has recommended that no 16-year-olds should be playing junior hockey - Bobby Orr was property of the Boston Bruins at 14 - but the sad reality of the NHL salary cap suggests that teams are increasingly reaching down into the junior ranks for cheaper labour, meaning the junior teams must, in turn, continue to recruit new blood.

Speaking of which, Thérien also points out that another advantage of the college game is that fighting is truly penalized in college hockey and players must wear complete facial protection.

Kelly says in an e-mail that this message for promising young players to look to school first is one College Hockey Inc. plans "to spread across Canada and the U.S. in the coming months." Let us hope it is heard in Canada as well as in the United States.

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While the evils of Canadian junior hockey - hazing, sexual abuse, gratuitous violence - have often been the focus, there are arguments to be made, as well, for positive experiences with coaches, with billets, with overall experience, even with financial help from junior leagues for those who wish to switch their ambitions to post-secondary schooling.

But there needs to be much more emphasis on what lies beyond. The 22 youngsters on Team Canada are fine young men with enormous skills. Yet history has proved that gold medals do not automatically gild a professional career.

Some of these young juniors - and hundreds of their current teammates back home - will need something to fall back on.

So let us all wish Paul Kelly more fortune in this job than his last.

His is a message that needs to be heard on both sides of the border.