People have (and will continue to) defend Crosby — we have a tendency to create blind spots when it comes to the athletically gifted among us, especially when they bring our country glory. Their argument is that sports should serve as an escape, and politics has no place in hockey. Let’s look at that justification a little more closely.

First, I tend to agree that sports should help us ‘get away from it all’ — a 24/7 hook-up to the toxic IV line that feeds you nothing but the non-stop bickering, back-stabbing and bile of professional politics sounds like literal hell. (It’s what I imagine working for CNN is like). The ability to don a jersey and scream and cry and shit yourself in fear, anticipation and excitement is beginning to feel like an existential necessity as the world outside of sports becomes more dark and dreary. So yes, sports should serve that purpose. And believe me, if every face-off was accompanied by a low-level City Councillor pedalling hydro savings in exchange for votes, I’d be the first one to send pitchfork through TV. But this was never about a complete takeover of sports by politics.

This was about a moment.

Athletes decided to use a fragment of an iota of an atom of their time in the spotlight to say something about the injustice they believed was happening in their country. As a response, people blew it up into an all-out war for the future of patriotism and freedom and whatever other lazy buzzwords the criminally depraved use to rile up the masses when they don’t feel like speaking with thoughtfulness or nuance. Which is insane.

Yes, the national anthem is a symbolic celebration of pride in one’s country. But you know what else happens during the national anthem at live sporting events? People grab beer and urinate. They use the national anthem to gauge how much time they have to collect their snacks before the game starts. Most TV stations don’t bother to broadcast the anthem because those two minutes could be sold to advertisers to generate more revenue. When networks do broadcast the anthem, how many among us actually rise out of our well-formed ass grooves, for a reason other than the fact that we left something in the other room? Athletes like Kaepernick were simply trying to use a quiet moment of reflection to bring attention to an issue that they believed their country could improve upon. That’s it. They weren’t saying that America sucked — they were saying it could get better at something. And if we really need to crucify them for that, let’s let the person that never used the anthem delay to refill their bowl of fucking Cheetos cast the first stone.

And before you go ahead and repeat the ‘but politics has no place in sports’ line, I’d like you to think back to the most celebrated moment in Canadian hockey history, and the reason why there’s 86 bajillion Canadian men in their mid-40’s named ‘Paul’. Yes, I’m referring to the Summit Series. The one against the Soviet Union. The one that had to be arranged by ambassadors and high-level members of Papa Trudeau’s government. The one that took place at the height of Cold War tensions. Is any of that ringing a bell? It was a hockey series for the fate of the free world, which sounds ridiculous now, but that’s how politically-charged the series was. Do you think anyone would remember Paul Henderson’s name if he had scored the game-winner for Canada against Burkina Faso? Exactly.

We can’t claim to want politics out of sports when it suits our argument, and then go and worship at the altar of a politicized sporting event that makes up a key square of our national cultural fabric. (Ironically, the people that still aren’t convinced that politics has a place in hockey and are rushing to call me and anyone who shares this opinion ‘liberal commies who hate liberty and freedom’ are the same people who would have been cheering the loudest for a hockey series where Canada faced off against actual real-life communists. But I digress.)

What does all of that have to do with Sidney Crosby? Well, the time you took to read that little side-rant is far longer than the time it took Crosby to consider his position on the issue. Because if he had, he would have never said an asinine thing like ‘this isn’t about politics’. Of course it is Sid. Think about it.

You’re visiting the White House. It’s the very literal physical embodiment of politics. If alien invaders ever grace us with their presence, a picture of the White House is on the title slide of the PowerPoint Presentation on how humanity’s political system works. The White House is a political entity. It takes politics to get there, politics to stay there, and politics to be removed. You can’t separate one from the other. But that’s exactly what Sid felt entitled to do.

And so, Canada’s most visible and internationally recognizable modern athlete decided to fully comply with a tradition of saluting a foreign leader whose values and views have proven to be a direct contradiction to what the leaf on his jersey is supposed to represent. After a career of exploiting those values to profit heavily from our shared Canadiana (Everyone jump on the ice with Sid, and don’t forget your piping hot Tim Horton’s Double-Double!) it’s astonishing that when the time came for Crosby to actually stand up for what that leaf means, he wilted.

Crosby can go on and win four more Cups, six more Harts, and three bazillions more of whatever the fuck they call the Trophy that they give out at the ‘Gary Bettman World Champions League of Misfit Countries’, and none of that will matter. He will no doubt don the leaf again, probably with another ‘C’ attached to it, and he might even think that he’s proudly representing what it means to put on that jersey. But for the rest of his career, Crosby will never again be worthy.