Even as spring slowly turns to summer, the lonely cry of the street hockey player can still be heard throughout Toronto.

One ambitious city councillor, who has taken up the cause, promises he will get them back on the road — legally.

Alas, now that the war on the car is over, his chances are small.

In this contest, the winner is a foregone conclusion: Having just committed itself to an ill-advised and massively expensive subway expansion program, all in the name of getting streetcars off streets, the city isn’t likely to take kindly to ball hockey players.

True, they won’t be playing their game in the middle of King, Queen, Dundas… major arteries where drivers are already so inconvenienced by public transit. But they will be setting up their nets on the side streets, residential roads and alleyways, places drivers rely on to get to their front doors as quickly as possible.

True, also, they have the advantage of youth. Our children must not be denied. Besides, in 2011, a decade or two into the Great Fatness, parents are thrilled when their kids want to do something that includes actual exercise.

Finally, it’s hockey we’re talking about, the great Canadian blood sport, popular in these parts long before GSP and UFC came to town. A game so ingrained in the culture, it makes winners of losers.

But what are health, youth and hockey compared to the power of the car?

Our dedication to the automobile in all its various forms has achieved the closed-loop perfection of terminal addiction. We are the smoker gasping through an iron lung while dreaming of the next puff.

Naturally, the city argues the ban on street hockey must stay because of safety and liability issues.

These are legitimate concerns, but only because Toronto’s streets — all publicly subsidized — were handed over to drivers in the first place.

What if ball hockey players had primacy over the streets and cars could use them, but at the players’ leisure. In other words, what if the situation were reversed and non-drivers — ball hockey players, pedestrians, dog-walkers, etc. — had the right-of-way? What would Toronto be like if drivers had to wait for them?

We’ll never know.

Rather than ask ourselves such questions, we settle for a strictly bureaucratic response: “There is some potential for increased public risk and liability to the city of no longer prohibiting the playing or taking part in any game or sport on the roadway,” Ron Hamilton, a city traffic operations manager, wrote in a recent report. “There is nothing inherently wrong with the way this issue is currently dealt with in Toronto at the present time.”

Nothing wrong? Nothing except that it denies countless residents access to huge parts of the public realm.

Who says streets are only for cars? Where is that writ in stone?

No one would seriously suggest that cars should be banished; but even in Toronto the need for a more balanced approach is obvious, one that treats non-drivers with the fairness and respect to which they are entitled.

While cities around the world look ahead, anticipate the future and try to redress this imbalance, Toronto has decided to turn the civic ship around and sail backwards, steady as she blows.

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Ball hockey players aren’t the only casualties. It’s never that simple. Already, drivers are caught in the downward spiral of a city at war with itself. As long as drivers’ needs come first, the rest of us will just have to stand and wait.

The game can’t resume until the car has passed.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca