It’s Our Game Says the Library Nerd

It was the last day of the Vancouver Olympics.

Students at the University of Toronto interrupt their studies to watch the Olympic male hockey final together on the computer. The author is sitting in the middle, fourth from the left. Courtesy of Arthur Faisman

TORONTO, Canada—It was one of those Toronto winter days where, despite a week of heavy snowstorms, the weather was reminiscent of warm and sunny April days when the snow is melting and the grass shows through once again.

It was the last day of the Vancouver Olympics and, as a “responsible” university student, I reminded myself I had a seminar presentation to host and a quiz to write the next day, and so I went to the library with my roommate, while my friends headed to the pub to watch what we will likely remember as the hockey game of our time: the gold medal game between Canada and the United States.

We were nervous. The wireless Internet system in the library appeared to be down for a while before the game began and, when it worked again, the speed was too slow to stream and run properly on my laptop. “Would we miss it completely?”

I spotted students at computer terminals with Internet speeds high enough to watch the online streams from CTV or TSN, and we went to watch along. The setting was most peculiar—we had no sound, just the images coming from the computer. Pages flipping, pencils dropped on tables, chitchat about how to solve problem sets, gum chewing and the like were the soundtrack. But it didn’t matter. We were as “into it” as anyone watching the historic face off, whether they were at the pub, at home in front of the TV, or at the Canada Hockey Place in Vancouver.