PHOTO: Jean Levac/Postmedia News

Marie-Philip Poulin of Canada celebrates her game tying goal against the USA during third period in their Gold medal match at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Games, February 20, 2014.

You don't have to be a diehard sports fan to become captured by the news coming out of Sochi with northern climate countries competing in the traditional ice- and snow-sports events. And certainly yesterday's women's hockey play-off between Canada and the United States was a tense, exciting event.

Made, perhaps, all the more so by the well-circulated animosity that exists between the players of the two teams. One might think that there would be a prevailing camaraderie between women who give themselves over so wholly to sports competition, having in common the North American experience of similar societies. Nothing could be further from reality when the word "compete" enters the formula. It seems the two sides detest one another.

And, presumably, this emotional pathology leads to ever more urgent determination on the part of the two teams to prove that one is superior to the other in their gamesmanship and execution of a team effort focused on discipline as much as spontaneity, since spontaneous reaction is what moves the game forward.

As for the game in question, it seemed as though the well-organized American women's hockey team had the game wrapped up, successfully foiling every effort of the Canadian team to score, in the absence of any successful goals by the Canadians facing the reality of two leading scores by the Americans. But then, in the final moments of the game that's not the way the game finally played out; Dame Fortune smiled benignly on the U.S. team, but gave the Canadian team the advantage to proceed to triumph.

A cartoon published in one of Canada's premier national newspapers summed it all up. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper is an avid hockey buff. He painstakingly wrote a book on the history of hockey, not long off the press to great critical acclaim. Coincidentally to this event at the Winter Olympics, the "three Amigos": Canada's prime minister, and the presidents of the United States and Mexico were meeting in Mexico to discuss trilateral relations and a potential refurbishing of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The United States remains notoriously disinterested in its neighbour to the north. Not one American legislator visited Canada in the year just past, for any reason related to cross-border relations, despite how incredibly integrated we are in many areas. The American national broadcaster's (PBS) television entity just recently casually closed a program with an errata, having spoken of Stephen Harper as the Canadian president.

In the immortal words of an ancient sage: we're 'chuffed'.