The depth and breadth of hockey’s place in Canadian culture can be hard to fathom beyond the borders. But it now might be heard, echoing from the north, thanks to a 3-2 overtime victory over the United States in the final event of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

To hear Canadians tell it, the hockey gold medal has come home, where it belongs.

Canada did not win as many medals as it had hoped at these Olympics, which closed on Sunday night, but it won more golds (14) than any country in history. The last, an emphatic exclamation point on the 2010 Vancouver Games, will be collectively cherished more than any other.

This, after all, is a country whose $5 bill has a scene of children playing hockey on a pond, with a quotation from the short story “The Hockey Sweater,” by Roch Carrier:

Image Kenneth Toews, center, and other fans a moment after Sidney Crosby's goal gave Canada the gold. Credit... Andrew Burton for The New York Times

“The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places  the school, the church and the skating rink  but our real life was on the skating rink.”

Hockey, the Canadian poet Richard Harrison once said, “is the national id.”

Father Dion did not blanch at the suggestion that hockey is religion in Canada. Rather, he detailed the natural congruencies: both are ingrained from a young age, passed among generations, studied and practiced reverently and  in the case of the Catholic parish, at least  have a box where sinners sit in penance.