Us Canadians are pretty calm – unless you mess with our few, sacred cultural icons.

This will be the first season in my life that Hockey Night in Canada won’t begin with the usual theme song. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation chose not to renew the license for the song, and has instituted a reality-TV-style contest to create a new song. This new song, of course, will be fully controlled by CBC — that way, when the network is done with it, they can properly shelve the song, to make sure that a critical piece of company branding doesn’t, for example, end up owned by a competitor like say, CTV.

When I think of the old song, I think of Saturday nights growing up. I think of being allowed to stay up late during playoffs, I think of my Mom admonishing my Dad for yelling when the home team did something stupid, and all of us yelling when they did something well. I think of popcorn made with those old hot air poppers and of us kids rolling around on the family room carpet in pajamas that had the feet sewn right into them.

So – the next generation will grow up associating a different jingle to their family memories. That’s ok. Times change.   What baffles me though,  is that the CBC would let their rights to this song lapse.  It deserves the equivalent of a business Darwin award.  How much do you want to bet that the Coca Cola company still owns the rights to “I’d like to teach the world to sing“?  Even after several decades, I have to imagine that PepsiCo couldn’t get their hands on that song…

Heck, I guess it worked out.  If I feel nostalgic I can just trip on over to TSN.