There are plenty of reasons to believe that hockey ought to have loosened its grip as Canada’s game of myth and legend by now.

As we celebrate the country’s 150th birthday, so many changes have taken place in sport and the manner in which we consume it that have worked to undermine hockey’s central role in the national culture, especially in the 50 years since the great Centennial bash of 1967. Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association set up shop here, challenging the National Hockey League’s dominance, while NHL expansion to non-traditional markets in the United States took it farther and farther away from the frozen ponds of yore. Canada has played host to the Olympic Games three times since ’67, which has worked to broaden both our sports interests and our supply of national heroes (though of course the men’s and women’s hockey gold medals were a huge part of the story during the patriotic orgy of 2010).

Combine those developments with an increasingly diverse population — a significant percentage of which was raised outside the bounds of the shinny belief system — and a technological and information revolution, and suddenly the notion of families gathered ’round a radio or television on Saturday night to listen to the one-game broadcast each week seems as anachronistic as a trip to town by horse and buggy.