In the summertime of 1988, once I was 14 years outdated, I went tenting with my household not far exterior Toronto. We emerged from the woods and I wandered over to a newspaper field by the aspect of the highway. By way of its cracked glass, I noticed a front-page image of Wayne Gretzky, weeping. He’d been traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings. I adopted my idol’s lead and burst into tears.

Gretzky, again then a minimum of, was greater than a hockey participant to Canadians. He was homegrown royalty, a participant of such high quality, of such uncommon risk, that he transcended the sport we’ve at all times used to outline ourselves. I wasn’t even a real hockey child, however I had Gretzky’s signature Titan stick, white with purple lettering, and a pennant on my bed room wall that memorialized his 1981–82 season, when he pocketed 92 targets and 120 assists for 212 factors, all information. He went on to higher that assists mark 5 occasions and reset his personal factors file with 215 in 1985–86. Nobody else has recorded greater than 200 factors in a season; he did 4 occasions, one for every Stanley Cup that he gained. He retired in 1999 with 61 information, together with the file for many information, and he nonetheless has extra assists than anybody else has managed factors. He modified hockey math, and with it our nation’s measure of itself.

Immediately Gretzky surrendered certainly one of his most cherished information—probably the most targets in an NHL profession—to Alex Ovechkin, a 39-year-old Russian who performs for the Washington Capitals. Ovechkin scored his 895th objective, one higher than Gretzky’s 894, within the second interval towards the Islanders in New York. He stomach flopped onto the ice in ecstasy and aid earlier than he was mobbed by his teammates, after which the sport stopped to rejoice the best objective scorer who ever lived.

Gretzky, 64 years outdated and red-faced, was there to witness the event, the way in which Gordie Howe had inspired Gretzky’s pursuit of his career-goals file. For greater than a century, Canadians had taken turns eclipsing each other, a sequence of succession that started with Joe Malone and included Howie Morenz and Maurice Richard, till Ovechkin overtook all of them, claiming what Spencer Carbery, the Canadian-born coach of the Capitals, known as “the best file in our sport.”

After Gretzky was traded to the Kings, his departure was solid as a mid-level nationwide tragedy. “The largest identify in Canadian sports activities, the person hockey followers name the Nice One, goes to the USA,” CBC anchor Knowlton Nash introduced with a solemnity often reserved for the deaths of princesses and declarations of conflict.

Not way back, Canadians may need regarded the lack of Gretzky’s file with related misery. Immediately they’re reacting with ambivalence. Some proportion of Canadians, together with latest waves of Ukrainian refugees, will really feel uneasy in regards to the file belonging to Ovechkin, a vocal supporter of Vladimir Putin. However for a lot of, the file had already slipped away—if not in 1988 then in 2025, when Donald Trump turned the U.S. president once more and Gretzky was there to cheer him on too.

Trump quickly enraged Canadians along with his “51st state” and “Governor Justin Trudeau” rubbish, his commerce conflict, and his open want to annex our nation. Anthem singers began getting earfuls at hockey video games. Gretzky, who seems to have spent extra time at Mar-a-Lago than in Canada recently, stayed a bit too quiet about the whole lot. When Canada and the usmet within the ultimate of the 4 Nations Face-Off in February, Gretzky was named our honorary captain and appeared reluctant to do it, with out a lot as a maple-leaf pin on his jacket lapel. After Canada gained in additional time—I haven’t yelled at my TV like that in years—Gretzky gave the gamers purple caps that stated Be Nice, a Trumpian echo that was both intentional or tone-deaf. He ended that debate on Friday evening when he watched Ovechkin’s chase alongside Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director. They sat collectively once more this afternoon.

By then, Canadians have been already calling Gretzky the “Nice As soon as.” Somebody smeared literal shit on his statue exterior Edmonton’s Rogers Place; petitions have been launched to rename the town’s Wayne Gretzky Drive and a parkway and area in his hometown of Brantford, Ontario. Janet Gretzky, his American spouse, got here to his protection on Instagram: “I’ve by no means met anybody who’s extra Proud to be a Canadian, and it has damaged his coronary heart to learn and see the imply feedback,” she wrote. She deleted the submit after different proud Canadians disputed her evaluation.

Again in 1988, many people in Canada blamed her for Gretzky’s exit. That they had married weeks earlier than the commerce, a couple of months after her star flip in Police Academy 5: Project Miami Seaside. Los Angeles will need to have been her thought, we assumed, a misogynist trope that survived even after it turned apparent that Gretzky’s exile was self-imposed. We erected statues in his honor and named roads and arenas after him anyway. He went to St. Louis, to New York, to Phoenix, and by some means remained claimed by us. In 2009, we named him a Companion of the Order of Canada, our highest civilian honor, and ignored that he didn’t trouble coming dwelling to choose up his medal.

Now it’s time for exhausting truths. Gretzky has lived within the U.S. longer than he lived up right here, in an American mansion with an American spouse and American youngsters, palling round on American golf programs with an American president who says that Canada “solely works as a state.” It would break Gretzky’s coronary heart to listen to it, however quite a lot of Canadians don’t consider him as certainly one of us anymore. As soon as, we cried over the place he performed his hockey. His face might have been on our cash, by no means thoughts his identify on our sticks. However he’s made clear his alternative, and so we’ve made ours. Wayne Gretzky’s information, like his faults, are singular. The loss is his and his alone.