Throw out the proverbial hockey baby with the dirty American bathwater.Flay Martin Brodeur while you’re at it. Pillory Pronger, Bag Babock... let’s call the whole thing off. Sunday’s hockey defeat at the hands of the United States had many Canadians showing up for work Monday with a hangover, but not of the liquid inspiration.

Instead, it was like the collective wind was knocked out of a nation in a 5-3 loss. People who rarely watch hockey, never mind naming the players or their corresponding NHL clubs, suddenly became critical experts on goaltending and everything else wrong with Canadian hockey — it is “our game” after all.Let’s take a chill pill, folks.

There is plenty of hockey left. We’ll leave it to our crack sports crew to dissect all the x’s and o’s of defeat and prospects versus Germany Tuesday, but suffice to say Sunday we got beat by a red-hot goalie. That’s all. It happens.

What is amazing in the push for the podium and the incredible amount of pressure and expectation heaped upon our elite athletes is we forget where we came from; what makes us  for the most part  respected and honoured in the court of international opinion. We share. In the good ol’ days when we were beating Denmark 40-0, we drove to bring the game to the world. We offered coaching and expertise, advice and support, money and even sticks, pucks and skates.

And now we get beat from time to time, and it’s somehow an international catastrophe. So it is true of curling where in men’s and women’s play, several of the countries are coached by ... Canadians. And so we lose more often than we once did. What did we expect would happen?

The choice is clear: We flourish our humanity and share in the spirit of global friendship and accept the fact we will lose sometimes. Or, we project an international image of closed selfishness. Is that the spirit of the Olympics? Is that Canadiana? It’s nice to win gold, but untarnished gold is much more palatable.