WEST VALLEY CITY, UTAH -- Long before the flags were raised, long before the crowning moment that Canadians had so long awaited, the strains of the national anthem began, quietly at first, then building in a great crescendo.

That song sounds different depending on where you're listening. At the beginning of the school day, at the start of one of a thousand sporting events, in just about any official context, it can play like bland background music, drained of all its meaning.

But far away from home, or in the wake of a referendum that just barely holds the country together, or sung spontaneously by a bunch of your ecstatic countrymen in Utah in the third period of the Olympic gold-medal hockey game with the outcome no longer in doubt, O Canada sounds sweet and perfect and cuts straight to the heart.

It rose yesterday in celebration of the familiar combination of skill and hard work and a sprinkling of good luck that produced a 5-2 win over the Americans that was just as decisive as the score would suggest.

It rose in acknowledgment of a grand, flag-waving opportunity for a country not exactly prone to indulging in self-celebration, the first Olympic men's hockey gold in half a century.

How to explain to anyone who isn't Canadian exactly what it meant to win this one particular hockey game? How to put into context something for which there aren't really a whole lot of parallels elsewhere?

Lots of countries have their national identities wrapped up with sport -- the Americans, with their unchallenged position in the games they cherish most, baseball and football and basketball, the Austrians with skiing, the Australians with swimming, the English or Brazilians or Germans or Argentines with their overwhelming passion for soccer.

And in the Olympic Games, where the subtext is all about celebrating hearth and home, short-track speed skating or trampoline can certainly do the trick in a pinch for just about anyone.

But Canadians and hockey, that's something special: a small population, cold climate, little guys living next to the big guys phenomenon that doesn't really translate anywhere else.

"Well, they have a certain pride involved in hockey," Chris Chelios of Team USA said of the strange foreigners with whom he's played for all those years in the National Hockey League. "You look at Mario's [Lemieux] quote this week, saying it's his game, it's Canada's game. . . . Hey, it may be the only game that they're very good at. Except for curling and maybe a couple of other things."

He was joking, but he has a point. In the national imagination, it has always been ours alone, and our superiority -- or at least our superior passion for the game -- was a given. Even as evidence mounted that that might not quite be a reflection of reality, even as our national teams succeeded and failed in a natural cycle, even as people began to do things on Saturday night other than sit down and watch the game, the idea of hockey remained central. All of that national longing was wrapped up in yesterday's gold-medal final. The truth is that, coming at the end of what may well have been the greatest tournament ever played, the game itself could have been considered a bit of an aesthetic disappointment.

Obviously, the result wasn't any kind of letdown, and there was certainly plenty of tension into the third period. But it wasn't a classic, seesaw battle: Team Canada had the Americans' number nearly from the start. The Yanks, who had looked so strong until the third period of their semi-final match against Russia on Friday, appeared tired, dead-legged and a bit ragged, while the same Canadian team that began the Olympics with a shellshock loss to the Swedes seemed smart and calm and in control.

The scoring chances were heavily in Canada's favour, and with a couple of better bounces, they would have put it away long before the final, two-goal outburst that set off the singing in the crowd.

How does the country feel today? Like everything's right with the world. Like your mom and dad really are infallible. Like there really is a Santa Claus. Like Wayne Gretzky can do no wrong.

A whole bunch of reputations hung in the balance here, though the truth is Gretzky's probably wasn't one of them: As general manager, he chose players that, for the most part, the fans and the tall foreheads agreed with, and of course when it came to actually playing the games, he wasn't going to lace them up. But give him credit for taking on his shoulders the full burden of national expectations, for saying that anything less than gold was failure, and then watching his players and coaches deliver.

"The feeling right now is pretty much incredible," Gretzky said after the game. "As a team we came a long way."

Perhaps that was as the result of a great master plan -- at least that's something Gretzky and Pat Quinn and all the rest now have every right to claim, given how the script played out. They started out awful, Lemieux started out playing as though he were 100 years old, and by the end they were a beautiful, balanced hockey machine, and Mario looked like his magnificent former self.

And perhaps there was just a bit of kismet involved -- not just in avoiding the Russians in the quarter final, not just in drawing Belarus in the semi, but in a small secret Gretzky revealed only after the final game was done.

Under centre ice at the E Centre, a loonie had been discreetly frozen under the playing surface. "The ice maker was from Canada," Gretzky explained, and immediately everyone understood the source of the talisman. Remember that the Canadian women had won there as well. To be of the gold-medal nation yesterday meant having to clarify that one particular detail, over and over again, for those from other lands. "Loonie. L-o-o-n-I-e. Like the bird. No, it's not real gold. It's worth about 64 cents, U.S."

A heck of a lot easier to explain that than the Edmonton Mercurys, or Paul Henderson, or all it meant yesterday to be one of us.