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The moment is instructive in that the crew’s reaction to Miller’s poke is the kind of thing you see among friends: The tease that would be an insult to an outsider, but is a friendly jibe to someone familiar, even if this one just happened on national television. The crew reacts like a tight-knit group, because circumstances have conspired to make them one. The guys in the truck, plus Miller and Ferraro and a small army of TSN employees, spend every Christmas season together in places like Ufa and Malmo and now Buffalo.

Photo by Scott Stinson / Postmedia Network

In the 25 years since TSN acquired the broadcast rights to the world juniors, it has evolved from a low-key curiosity to one of the biggest tentpole events in Canadian sports programming. In conversations with various TSN people over a couple of days in Buffalo last week, the same phrase comes up again and again: they have created a monster. And so Miller, Ferraro and the rest of TSN’s top crew gather annually to showcase the work of, essentially, a bunch of teenagers. Millions of Canadians — and hockey fans in Europe — will watch them do it.

So, how did TSN create this beast?

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Paul Graham was around at the start.

When TSN bought the rights to the world juniors before the 1991 tournament, it was the broadcasting equivalent of a speculative mining stock. Games at the world juniors had rarely been shown live, and the only moment with which anyone was familiar was the brawl between Canada and the Soviets a few years earlier. TSN started off showing just five games in the tournament — it was just a round-robin then — and the following year, in Fussen, in Germany’s Bavarian region, Graham says that the crowds were at least dozens strong. The Soviet team had to get new uniforms as the tournament went on, as the USSR had officially dissolved. The Commonwealth of Independent States still won gold.