(To all you kids out there, drink water.) Count yourself lucky if that's your cross to bear for caring more about the Belleville Bulls and Peterborough Petes than Boston Bruins and Philadephia Flyers. Junior hockey aficionados might get sicker of hearing it than that Gatorade advertorial TSN persists in running as an intermission feature every year, but so be it. There are tight parameters on media access, like anywhere.Īs a result, you tend to get one bit of back-story about each teenager wearing the Maple Leaf that you'll want to put on some forgotten shelf by New Year's Day, like that toy that got old fast. Most of the media horde covering the tournament also, to their credit, are going by rote during their three-week crash course in junior hockey after covering the NHL 24/7. The vast majority might know little about a particular player outside of what NHL team has drafted him, so background details have to remain pretty simple. Most of the three million or so Canadians who will watch the typical Team Canada game are tuned into the NHL. The one sticking point might come in how much the audience is told about Canada's players. It's a 12-day tournament, so each game that includes evenly matched teams counts for something in the pursuit of that gold medal.

Oh, the games themselves are often the most riveting hockey one will see all season. The childhood phenomenon of getting a new toy, playing with it all Christmas Day and then getting bored with it is very germane to the world junior championship.

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