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But multiple-sport athletes are becoming a thing of the past.

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Hockey, if it isn’t already, is in danger of becoming an illness in Canada, possibly untreatable.

We mock Americans for their obsessive love of football’s ingrained brutality and the cavalier way fans and parents and league administrators shrug off all of that sport’s accompanying detritus, but do we ever look in the mirror?

Our national winter sport has become terrifyingly expensive, dangerously elitist, and is slowly but surely hacking away at the roots of what made the possibility of greatness accessible, albeit at greater or lesser odds, to any kid with talent and a dream.

Now it also takes money, and plenty of it.

Hockey Canada, while supporting programs to get more six-year-olds drawn into the feeder system with one hand, is tacitly endorsing the elitist model with the other.

And parents with stars in their eyes can see clearly that the preferred path to “the next level” for their kids had best include a strict single-sport focus, more ice time, pro-style training at an absurdly young age — and yes, those $35,000 to $50,000-plus per year academies that will promise all that and a modicum of education, too, just in case Junior turns out to be among the 99.9 per cent of all hockey playing Canadian kids who never make it to the big money.

Many academies have a famous graduate as an avatar, or an NHL coach on the masthead, as proof that the system works. And it does, for a very special few … who might have made it anyway.