MONTREAL—It was the voice, always the voice. Not the vocabulary, which in this country belonged to Danny Gallivan; Gallivan would play the piano’s minor keys, make harmonies, tinkle up and down. In the 1970s Gallivan would describe “cannonading shots” and describe Guy Lafleur as “coming out rather gingerly on the right side.” Doc Emrick remembers going out of his way as a young man to listen to Danny Gallivan, and still knows many of the signature calls by heart.

Bob Cole, though: He has never wandered to the far ends of the piano, preferring to strike the major chords. On Wednesday night Cole called Game 5 between Chicago and Los Angeles for Hockey Night in Canada, and the thing took off. The first overtime took just 26 minutes of real time to play; there was a span of eight and a half minutes between whistles. It was breathtaking, so fast, and Bob carried right along with it.

“That’s when Bob’s at his best,” says Scott Oake, also of Hockey Night in Canada. “His greatest gift is his ability to read the game, and take the level to where it needs to go. He can still read it better than anybody.”

And it became, by general consensus, another shared Bob Cole moment. I was in a bar in New York, unable to hear it; I asked people to describe it, and responses poured in. My colleague Dave Hodge of TSN, who worked with Cole for years on Hockey Night in Canada, said Cole’s voice is “hockey’s perfect soundtrack, and a voice that makes any game he does sound better than it looks. As good as last night’s overtime was, the soundtrack was even better.”

Cole will turn 81 within a week or two of the end of the hockey season, and his future is not publicly certain yet. Hockey Night in Canada has been rented out wholesale by the spineless executives at the CBC, who couldn’t find it in them to bargain any better when Rogers Communications successfully locked up all national NHL rights, and told the CBC it was this way or nothing. The CBC, in its way, opted for both.

So Rogers rules the hockey broadcasting universe now, and it has not announced what will happen to Bob Cole, among other things. The smart money remains on some sort of role as a national play-by-play man, maybe a reduced one, some ceremonial honours, perhaps an easing of the great man towards the door.

Nobody has said, yet. Until it’s done, Bob Cole could be calling his final game Friday night, or Sunday night. The only certainty is that day is coming. In 2013, Cole told Sean Fitz-Gerald of the National Post, “I love doing this. This is great. I don’t ever want to stop this. Now, somebody’s going to stop me someday by saying: ‘No, we don’t want you anymore.’ And when that day comes, I guess I don’t have any choice. I’m gone.”

Cole has traditionally resisted being pushed aside, though, and the voice has remained. His eyesight likely isn’t what it used to be, and he has misidentified — or not identified — certain players for years. He was at his nadir maybe four, five years ago, but even in the 2006 and 2007 playoffs there were “Fire Bob Cole!” chants and signs in some Canadian arenas.

There has been a renaissance of sorts, even if he’s still technically flawed. Players go unnamed, or are mixed up. Mistakes are made. This season Cole accidentally called the end of the Rangers-Penguins series before it was over, after Game 4.

But that voice — a masterpiece of timbre and tone, with a touch of its Newfoundland roots, a little clipped, positively sonorous — is still matchless, still worth it. His CBC colleagues all have an imitation, which is so ubiquitous that sometimes someone will be doing it — “we’re OK here, yes we are” — and Cole will turn around from, say, the front seat of the taxi and say, in the real thing, “Hey! You’re doin’ me, you know!”

If you think about it, Cole’s use of the language is so straightforward, so simple. Oh, baby. Scores! Oh my goodness! Can . . . you . . . believe it! He hammers names, employs pauses, and turns three-syllable names into three-part novels: Des-jar-dins, or Mon-tre-al. The Canadiens win . . . the Stanley Cup! When the Soviet Red Army left the ice in a game against the brutish Philadelphia Flyers, Cole said over and over, “They’re goin’ home! They’re goin’ home!” The game eventually resumed.

No, it’s the voice, and the cadence, and the instinct for hockey’s rhythms. He rides the four levels of voice that Foster Hewitt once told him to establish and use wisely, and it’s as if he’s interpreting the game, rather than calling it. Those Bob Cole moments we have left are so few, and they will dwindle. And however it ends, when it’s over, we’ll say this: When you heard his voice you knew where you were. When you heard his voice it sounded like hockey, and nothing else.

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