I liked Nashville — although the attraction wasn’t immediate. Because Music Row is so quaintly low-rise compared to Bridgestone’s milk white enormity, it appeared to me, at first, to be more replica than real. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have encountered holograms of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Minnie Pearl, and Roy Acuff. But that was only my first impression. A stroll up and down the two blocks that sit near the centre of the country music universe corrected my view: the honky-tonks are real, the buskers are real, and local shops such as the Gruhn Guitars and Hatch Show Print — a working letterpress and design shop that produced posters for Elvis Presley fairground concerts and Patsy Cline’s gigs at the Opry, among many others — are uniquely Nashvillean. So are the panhandlers. One I talked to said he was sleeping in the woods, and the deep space behind his pale blue eyes, his grizzled face, his soft cottonwood accent, and his respectful, courtly manner reminded me of what the contemporary uniformity of hotel lobbies, spiffy glass elevators, and Starbucks had put out of my head: I was in the land of Davy Crockett.

I was given a tour of Bridgestone by Jessica Jones, the arena’s “Corporate Communications Coordinator.” She was young, attractive, bright, and extremely accommodating — even though I was so obviously not a member of the hockey press. For one thing, hockey writers are not impressed at being admitted to an arena before the doors are opened to the public. But I was. I carry with me a vestigial awe of hockey’s venues — a memento of childhood excursions with my father to the smoke-wreathed heights of Maple Leaf Gardens. And for another: the looks of momentary uncertainty that crossed the faces of the writers and television commentators to whom Jessica introduced me — a constant reminder that I was not only an outsider, professionally speaking; I was, in addition, a foreigner from a country so strange and distantly northern that its magazines are named after Arctic animals. I couldn’t have felt more exotic had I been wearing a parka and mukluks.

The Los Angeles Kings were in town that night, and the arena had a bustling, cheerful air of anticipation to it. The people who ran the concession stands were busy preparing for the pre-game rush. The clerks in the Predators pro shop were bracing themselves for the onslaught of kids who coveted jerseys emblazoned with the names of Weber, Rinne, or Sullivan ($74.99 US each). The army of ushers — in their white shirts, vests, and formal-looking gloves — were making their way to their stations throughout the arena as we headed down the stairs to the room where the media dinner was served. They had the determined look of sentries heading off to take up their positions. We had to step out of the path of their uniform, hurried advance.

The locals are quick to tell you how successfully the Predators have woven themselves into the fabric of Nashville life. The city that lays claim to heroes as down to earth as Bob Wills and Willie Nelson takes pride in the team’s hard-won victories and blue-collar persona. “When you talk about the Predators,” coach Barry Trotz tells the press, “you don’t talk about a superstar. You talk about a group. That’s how we get it done — just good balance.”

Trotz is the only coach the Preds have had in their thirteen-year history, and while I was in Nashville I heard a story about him that illustrates how attentive the team is to community relations. A few years ago, a young boy approached him in a lineup at a local cinema and asked for an autograph. Trotz apologized for not having anything appropriate to sign but jotted down the boy’s address and said he’d send him something. The boy was warned by realistic adults not to get his hopes up, but, sure enough, a signed eight-by-ten glossy of coach Trotz appeared in the mail a few days later. In another story, a Nashville hockey mom was struggling to put her child’s skates on. There are several youth hockey programs in the area, but dealing with hockey gear is still far from second nature to parents who did not grow up cruising the blue lines of windswept Kiwanis Club rinks or dreaming of joining the Ice Capades. Fortunately, the woman beside her offered to help. And, even better, she turned out to be the wife of Steve Sullivan, the Predators’ assistant captain. “There’s not a lot of elitist places to hang out in Nashville,” Jim Diamond, a local hockey writer, told me. “You run into players and players’ wives with their kids at the rinks or at the grocery store. They’re part of the community.”

I don’t doubt it. When Jessica led me through the arena’s basement, the place had a friendly, down-home, easygoing feel — quite at odds with the do-or-die shtick I associate with professional hockey. I’d always imagined that players waiting for game time would have something of the tense, solemn demeanour of fighter pilots waiting for the airfield siren. But we had to stop in the hallway to wait for a pause in the raucous soccer game that a few of the Predators have made a pre-game ritual. Without their uniforms, pads, and helmets, they looked like high school kids goofing off, and, like high school kids speaking to a good-natured and good-looking teacher, they apologized politely to Jessica for holding us up.

I chose this moment to ask Jessica what had stood on the site of Bridgestone before the arena was built. She looked at me quizzically, as if the question were a trick. After a brief pause, she decided I was serious. And perhaps not very bright.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing?”

I had assumed that Bridgestone had replaced a more ragtag and dishevelled section of downtown Nashville. Perhaps only the honky-tonks without the autographed pictures of Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard had been bulldozed. But what that part of town had been like and what stories it held were apparently long gone. Maybe the panhandlers who sleep in the Tennessee woods might remember, but up-and-coming Nashville had put it out of mind. Jessica seemed to have no image of an urban past preceding the urban present. It was as if Bridgestone, like professional hockey itself, had fallen on Nashville’s vacant municipal potential like a meteorite. “They found a fang from a sabre-toothed tiger when they were excavating nearby,” Jessica said. “That’s where the Predators logo comes from.”

f you are driving across the state of Florida to attend an nhl hockey game, and if you are a Canadian and on your own, you might — somewhere around Lake Okeechobee, probably — plummet into depths of loneliness heretofore uncharted. I know all about it.

This is not normal loneliness — not the sort that is the subject of most of the New Country music I’ve been unable to avoid since Tampa. This isn’t something that a mini-bar can fix. Nor do I think Jesus would be of much help — contrary to the spiritual advice offered by the few radio stations in Florida that don’t play New Country. Because this is no momentary anxiety. As I pass Fuddruckers and Olive Garden and Red Lobster and Cracker Barrel and Denny’s and Walmart and Home Depot and the Cheesecake Factory and Applebee’s and Hardee’s and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and Doubletree and La Quinta and Popeyes, I am taken by a dark fear.

I begin to suspect that I have missed the point of the twenty-first century. I begin to consider the possibility that because of the peculiarity of my nationality — my Canadianness — I do not understand the world in which I live. To begin with, I’ve never seen two more obese people than the couple I saw in a tgi Friday’s somewhere due west of Orlando. And it wasn’t their size so much as the fact that nobody else in the restaurant seemed to find it remarkable that makes me think that my apprehension of reality may not be as keen as I’d imagined. I have underestimated the great, swirling maw of American appetite. I have actually imagined that what Canadians care or believe or remember about hockey will be enough to prevent the game from being sucked down its gullet.

Wealth does not confidently reside in the beleaguered strata of middle-class America anymore, but a whole lot of spending still does, and the nhl — the business enterprise, not the game many Canadians believe to be the ultimate expression of our national identity — saw the same growth opportunity that Hollywood and television, and religion, and politics, and advertising all have. If you are a business in America, you’d be crazy not to want to clamp onto the same enormous tit that Foot Locker, LensCrafters, Sbarro, Wendy’s, H&M, McDonald’s, Victoria’s Secret and J. Crew have, and once you were there, the faint, wounded clamour for an nhl team coming from a place as far away as Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, would only become more distant and inconsequential. Eventually, you’d stop hearing it altogether.

The nhl’s decision to expand into the Sunbelt was not without its risks — as the ongoing saga of the money-losing Phoenix Coyotes illustrates. But the size of the American population makes American risks worth taking — something that can’t be said of Canada. And anyway, much bigger things than Canadian sentimentality have been lost in the vortex of American consumption. Visited by the cold, hard facts of the near-total irrelevance of Canada to anything the United States imagines to be of any interest, or of profit, I am reminded, as I drive, that on three separate occasions during this trip I spoke to three different Americans about Olympic hockey, and each of them said almost exactly the same thing: “Yes, I heard that game was really exciting. But remind me: Who won?”