I was born in 1972. If you were my father, you would remember it as the year of the big hockey game. Never mind Watergate. Never mind the end of the Apollo space program. Russia versus Canada is now available on video as a Time-Life Classic.

Hockey was taken seriously in our household, and my father came by it naturally. He grew up in Edmonton, and that means more than grain elevators and prairie winters. It means the Edmonton Oilers.

The white coffee mug with the orange and blue emblem was the only mug my nana would drink tea or coffee from. She used to take it with her when she travelled, and I still remember her unpacking it with her mini electric kettle at the Banff Springs Hotel, where we all met for Christmas when I was a child. She called Wayne Gretzky her golden boy, and the pecking order was crystal clear. First Wayne, then my father, John Alan, and then my papa, John Charles.

When we visited them at their home in Edmonton, dinner was planned around Hockey Night in Canada. If we took too long, my nana, my father and Papa would go to the living room to watch the game while my mother, my sister and I cleaned up in the kitchen, figuring out dessert and her dishwasher, which was on wheels and had to be hooked up to the faucet. Nana was a woman in every sense of the word: high heels, bobby pins and nylons, and a passion for hockey, the Oilers and Wayne Gretzky.

Television was interactive at our house. "Shoot! Shoot!" and "He's wide open!" could be heard over the voices of the announcers. My father took us to hockey games when we were little girls and it made him proud that we could name the teams. The year the Flames beat the Oilers on their way to the Stanley Cup, his relatives in Calgary sent us a sympathy bouquet.

So it was a given that when my sister and I went to visit my father and my stepmother last year for Easter weekend, we ended up sitting in front of the television watching hockey. My sister had bought Dr. Phil's Relationship Rescue workbook from Chapters that morning and she read to me from it while my father watched the game. "Name the people you admire most," she said. I thought about it.

"Your mother," said my father. "And Papa."

My sister looked at me in surprise. I raised my eyebrows.

She looked down at her book, to the next question. "When was your happiest moment?"

"In Maui, with your mother," he said.

It was too good to be true. Next question. "What were you doing?"

"None of your business." He laughed. We squealed.

During Easter dinner that evening, his team went into sudden death overtime, so he, John and Roger took their coffee into the living room to watch the end of the game. Dallas scored and it was over.

I finished the dishes in the kitchen and then sat down on the couch with my father in front of the television-the boob tube, as my mom used to call it. He put his head on my shoulder and I could hear his heart beating. My stepmother leaned back in her chair at the table and looked at us, with meaning. He got up and went back to the table and I stayed where I was in front of the television. After my mother died, I guess my father had been left wide open.

My mother's brother lives in Ontario and plays in a beer league. If I call when the game is on I have to call back later. He is faithful to one team, the Maple Leafs. He plants a tree for my mother, every year, on his farm. He watches the game in the room he built for himself off the kitchen, drinking light beer, laughing and yelling at the plays and the players, while outside, just to the right of where he's sitting, the trees he planted grow in two straight lines away from the farmhouse. They face each other like members of a hockey team before the whistle blows. They are quiet in the darkness, sometimes under snow, peaceful and lit by the moon, glowing blue as the television screen.