If there is a lesson in Canadian sports television, it is to never mess with Ron MacLean.

About to officially return to hosting Hockey Night in Canada, he is now firmly planted as the face of NHL broadcasting in this country.

It is a stark change from three years ago, when it was announced that Rogers was taking the reins of NHL hockey in this country in a huge $5.2-billion, 12-year deal. With that, everything was new — more broadcasts on more nights, many new commentators and panellists all coming from a huge, gleaming, brand new studio.

George Stroumboulopoulos was in. While MacLean, 56, still held onto his Coach’s Corner duties, he was relegated to then-new Hometown Hockey on Sunday night, a travelling caravan that moved from town to town across the land. For anyone else, it’d be like going from hosting the Super Bowl to handling the MC duties at the county fair.

Then the wheels fell off. Canadians were confused about how to find the games, ratings were down and last year no Canadian teams made the playoffs, which led to ridiculous complaints about Strombo, including nitpicking about his clothing. Last June, the Star’s Dave Feschuk broke news that change was coming. Out with the new, in with the old.

“None of us could have known, right? It was a whole new frontier. You know the biggest change, and the biggest reason George became the scapegoat, is that there was this abundance of hockey television available,” MacLean said in a phone interview prior to the start of the NHL season Wednesday.

“And it all looked pretty similar, and I think that was the real snag, that nobody could search out the original. But that was no reflection on George, as I’ve said that many, many times. I would have had a tough go in those two years, with all the changes that took place, seven Canadian teams missing the playoffs and so on. It was going to be a real challenge for us to establish that this was a better idea. And in the end, both the young and the old were saying: where was the one that we liked?”

Actually, during that time there were polls and social media postings that said MacLean was the one we liked. Of course, in some ways this is a case of history repeating itself. Since its inception, the host of the Saturday night hockey show is Canada’s version of Walter Cronkite (or for the less ancient, Jon Stewart) and change is never greeted well.

Looking back in the Star’s archives, one of the first mentions of MacLean was from legendary sports reporter Frank Orr, who warned about the big shoes he was filling in 1987: “The man with the toughest act to follow is television hockey host Ron MacLean. He replaces the impeccable Dave Hodge and before MacLean can be judged on his own merits, viewers first must forget about Hodge.”

There was scandal back then — Hodge was eventually fired after he flipped his pen on a live broadcast when CBC didn’t show the remainder of a tied game between the Montreal Canadiens and Philadelphia Flyers in March, 1987.

Now MacLean is the old steady hand that Rogers hopes will make people forget about Strombo’s suits.

“It was a different world, a much quieter world. I would never have supplanted Dave in (1987) if there was social media. There wasn’t even email in those days,” he says. “You couldn’t have an instant referendum on everything with the public voice.”

There was also the time when CBC played hardball in contract negotiations in 2002 and they mutually announced he was leaving. The public outcry forced the TV execs to get the deal done and the man back in the chair.

A perfect example is how this change is being treated. When news broke of MacLean being courted to return to Saturday night, one of the sticking points was that he didn’t want to give up his Sunday night duties. Rather than being thought of as a celebrity making a power play for more air time, responsibility and control, instead we are greeted with commercials setting this year’s tone, about reigniting a love affair between a game and a nation.

MacLean says he wanted to keep doing Sunday nights because it is a better spot to tell smaller, local hockey stories, but also because the show kept him in the game.

“I kind of fell into it. I feel a little bit like it was a guardian angel, when I was probably close to done, right?” he says. “This show comes along and rescues me, but not only gives me a new challenge. Everywhere I went it was just so fun to talk to people and tell hockey stories.”

Another big change is the result of MacLean’s Sunday commitments. With his need to travel, the Saturday late games will be hosted by David Amber, and at some point during the show the two will trade off duties. Beyond that, there’s a pared down panel but likely a return to MacLean’s signature style, full of references to sports and Canadiana, hockey talk and his corny, terrible pun-filled humour.

“Some people say you don’t watch shows for the host. Well, if that was true, we wouldn’t pay them what we pay them,” says Scott Moore, president of Sportsnet and NHL Properties at Rogers.

“I think Ron will have a major impact on ratings. We already saw it in World Cup of Hockey, because people want to hear what Ron has to say. His ability to talk hockey is different than most hosts . . . he’s just got an ease of being able to talk hockey because of his encyclopedic knowledge.”

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That said, people didn’t follow MacLean to Sundays the past two years, with ratings averaging less than a half-million for that night, which is considered disappointing, although it might help now that he links both weekend broadcasts.

When asked what all this says about hockey fans, and whether they need their coverage to be like comfort food, MacLean doesn’t fight it that I’ve just basically called him mashed potatoes.

“Well, I think we want everything to be like that. I think we want everything to be like Norman Rockwell in the end. We flip back and forth between hero worship and witch hunts in all that we do. If you catch us on a good day we’re generous and loving, and if you catch us on a bad day we’re critical to the point of cynical,” he says. “Obviously, I am just the beneficiary of that epic lesson. It is one of those tested and true formulas that I happen to get caught up in, but it’s because I’ve been here for 28 years. It’s as simple as that.”

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