THIS IS WHERE WE LOVE HOCKEY, ENJOY OVERTIME AND WAIT FOR … BEDARD

Gary Bettman has extensive parity among Cup contenders, and while we wait for a Canadian team to win for the first time in 31 years, a big media issue is when Connor Bedard becomes a dream … or leaves

     From New York to Edmonton, from Carolina to Las Vegas — almost everywhere he can gaze at 5 feet, 7 inches — Gary Bettman has what every commissioner wants. The Stanley Cup not only generates parity but features no odds-on favorite, which prompts sweating gamblers and thirsting sportsbooks and curious fanboys. We enter the Super Bowl tournament with two or three gimmes. Hockey’s grind has nine or 10 teams that will do what the winner prefers with the cylinder this summer.

     There is nothing, not even a momentary embrace between Taylor Swift and Caitlin Clark, that can match postseason overtime. The sport has its diehards and won’t lure throngs, despite attempts through the decades to make it larger in North Americana. Games are worth watching nonetheless, even if a common dude doesn’t know Auston Matthews scored 69 goals and hails from Scottsdale, which no longer has a club after the Arizona Coyotes moved to Salt Lake City.

     If you’re going to partake, you wait for May and June. This is where you discover Cale Makar and why he and Nathan MacKinnon are two of the NHL’s best four players in Colorado. This is why it’s paramount Connor McDavid finally wins so the Oilers don’t screw up his kinship with Leon Draisaitl, who could depart this offseason. Angles are aplenty and, somewhat geopolitically, nothing is weightier than the U.S. entering a fourth decade blocking Canada from claiming a Cup. All we ever did in our land was inherit franchises within the Original Six in 1942. Hockey is the northerly neighbor’s national sport, and though it has reached the final six times, our football/basketball/baseball culture has won every championship since 1994. Say Edmonton, Winnipeg, Vancouver or, dare I say, Toronto wins it all.

     Will we be inundated with poutine, maple syrup and geese? Or, better, Molson?

     “It’s going to be a hell of a party. You might be Canada’s team after that Stanley Cup,” said Canucks coach Rick Tocchet, who won Cups in Pittsburgh but was born in Ontario. “There’s a lot at stake for the Canadian teams that are in. As a Canadian, it could be huge. That would be the ultimate, right?”

     It will remind those poor souls that teams in places that can’t freeze ice outside — current champion Vegas, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles and Anaheim, and mostly, Carolina and Dallas — should be moping as the Canadiens and Maple Leafs have. Canada deserves a bash, but again, it won’t happen. The West is loaded with title-caliber teams, including the Oilers and Jets with top dogs Dallas and Colorado, but the East is enriched by the Hurricanes, who play by Raleigh’s city limits in one of sport’s smallest markets. No TV executive wants this: Carolina versus Winnipeg.

     Prepare.

     “Playoffs are a different time,” Hurricanes general manager Don Waddell said. “That is what’s great about the NHL. Once you get in, it’s wide open.”

     Never mind that few of us could name anyone on his team. I’ll give you the goalie, Frederik Andersen, and their coach, Rod Brind’Amour. The Rangers have brought pride to Madison Square Garden, like the Knicks, and they have a premier goaltender in Igor Shesterkin and a sniper in Artemi Panarin. Florida has Matthew Tkachuk, a throwback who could be the league’s face, good enough that Charles Barkley saw the family tree and called him “the greatest Tkachuk.” The Boston Bruins should have won last year after a record-bashing regular season, only to be stunned by Tkachuk in the first round. “We know how to handle adversity when it smacks you in the face,” coach Jim Montgomery said. “We know there’s a way we need to look on the ice and what we should look like, to ourselves most importantly. And when we look like that, we think we can play with anyone in the league.”

     At least they overcame gnashing between newcomer Pat Maroon and the team’s TV play-by-play man. When Maroon played for Tampa Bay last November, Jack Edwards said of the 230-pound winger, “I’ve got a feeling he’s had a few more pizzas between then and now. Fasting for Pat Maroon is like four hours without a meal. But hey, three Cups in a row, who can argue with his formula?” Now he wants a fourth Cup in Boston, after one in St. Louis and two with the Lightning. Edwards apologized while he was asked by Maroon to step on a locker-room scale. Sadly, the voice is facing imminent retirement with a speech problem.

     What we await is the emergence of Connor Bedard as a media creation. Still 18, he survived a classically dismal rookie season in Chicago — 23-53-6, not quite as bad as the White Sox — with a broken jaw and 61 points in 67 games. He has grown up since draft night. His hair is longer. People are watching him come of age as a young man.

     But he must win. Before the season, his father told a Blackhawks reporter that professional sports take different turns. Already, I’m beginning to wonder if Bedard ultimately will flee for a winner. Vegas? Carolina? Detroit, where Chicago legends such as Patrick Kane and Chris Chelios played? His hometown of Vancouver? Isn’t it sorry when great athletes land in that city because of the lottery and collide with instant failure? “It’s a strange feeling, ending off the year,” he said. “We’re sad but nothing crazy. … It’s been a frustrating year, too, with the record.”

     One victory will be the Calder Trophy, as the league’s rookie of the year. He doesn’t care. “I haven’t paid attention at all,” Bedard said. “Everyone is going to go into the summer a little pissed off with how things went. All we can control is how much we get better throughout the summer and come back motivated and try to have a different result than we did this year.”

     Gary Bettman has Stanley Cup competitive fever. Too bad that he doesn’t groom conversation pieces for decades. In 32 years, he first inherited Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. Since then, he was handed Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, hockey magnificence but without making commercial waves in America. McDavid is a god in Canada but could walk down a U.S. street without a glimpse. Steven Stamkos, Erik Karlsson, Evgeni Malkin, Patrice Bergeron? Niche products, all. The best player in New York has been Henrik Lundqvist. The best in Los Angeles is Anze Kopitar. I haven’t seen a Kopitar jersey outside the arena.

     The commissioner exists to make money for owners. Ryan Smith saved the Coyotes and will give them a new nickname, such as the Yeti, somehow fitting in with Seattle’s Kraken. Someone else might rescue the Jets, where attendance is down despite a fun season. Houston wants a team. From up north comes another suggestion.

     Quebec City.

     We don’t care what Canada thinks. Win a Cup. Then we might listen, maybe not.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.