Allan Cup: the hockey trophy and tournament Canada has nearly forgotten

Knowing how much sweat equity and sacrifice goes into winning a championship in hockey means it almost feels like an intrusion to point out the Allan Cup is rather low-profile.

The truth has to hurt sometimes, though, and that might be better than keeping up the fiction that Canada's senior amateur hockey championship still commands great interest across the country. It also bears pointing out since the >Allan Cup was trending high among the most-searched terms on the Internet this week, even though senior amateur hockey only exists in isolated pockets across Canada. Presumably the curiosity comes from the fact TSN2 is showing the final at 10 p.m. ET on Saturday night between the winners of Friday's games which match the the host Lloydminster Border Kings against the Rosetown Red Wings in an all-Saskatchewan matchup and the South East (Man.) Prairie Thunder against the defending champion Grand Falls-Windsor (N.L.) Cataractes.

What is the Allan Cup and why has it fallen off the map to the point where it only seems of vital interest in places that are only a small dot on the map? To answer the first part, the storied chalice came into being in the early 20th century, that era when there were still some vestiges of the Victorian notion that being paid to play a game was vulgar. (Remember kids, the notion of amateurism in sports, which is sadly still lingering in 2012, came from Victorian England, not the ancient Greeks.) When the powers-that-be decided that only professionals would compete for the Stanley Cup, something had to be created for the amateur hockey player to aspire toward.

For much of the 20th century, the Allan Cup was very relevant. Up until the 1960s, when a national team program was created, the winning team represented Canada the following year at the IIHF world championship in Europe and the Winter Olympics. As late as 1961, the Trail Smoke Eaters (who were actually the Allan Cup runner-up) were able to conquer Europe and win the worlds, led by notables such as Bobby Kromm, whom guided the Bobby Hull-led Winnipeg Jets to a World Hockey Association title and won the Jack Adams Award as NHL coach of the year in the 1970s.

That 1950s and early '60s period were the salad days for senior hockey in Canada. There were only six NHL teams, all in the eastern half of North America. The opportunities to play professionally would remain somewhat limited until the NHL expanded at long last in 1967 — some of the newly minted NHLers when it did expand had a senior hockey background, such as all-time all-name team candidate Cesare Maniago. So there was a surfeit of players with pro-grade skills who had to work regular jobs and mid-sized cities across Canada were only too willing to entice them to move to town and perhaps become part of the community.

For instance, in 2004 I had the great privilege of profiling Mike Durban, who's the answer to one of the great obscure hockey trivia questions of all time: who was the first Canadian hockey player to score a goal on Russian soil? Durban did so in 1958 when the Kelowna Packers became the first western sports team to visit the USSR, making an eight-game overseas trip that also included stopping in Sweden. It's little remembered, but that exhibition tour is seen by many as planting the seeds that led today's Canada-Russia rivalry. As Durban remembered it, the reason he ended up in Kelowna is that a recession at the dawn of the 1950s led to several U.S. minor pro teams folding, squeezing many capable Canadian players out of jobs in hockey. They had to go somewhere. In his case, he settled in the central Okanagan and ended up becoming Kelowna's fire chief.

So what changed? Taking the long, straight-line view, the easy answer is that the proliferation of pro hockey teams and of televised sports, not to mention the major junior hockey becoming more monetized and better marketed, took the allure away from senior hockey. Why watch former juniors and former pros when one could watch a NHL game almost every night from the comfort of her/his living room, or watch teenagers who are held up as embodying hope for less than $25 by attending a Canadian Hockey League game?

Senior hockey was still significant enough in the 1980s that The Hockey News would still detail the feats of winning teams such as the Brantford Motts Clamatos. (Could anything embody 1980s Canada more than a hockey team sponsored a drink used to make Caesars?) But between those aforementioned outside influences and a few small-town George Steinbrenners willing to break the bank to stack their team, thus making it harder for some senior teams to stay competitive and maintain local interest, senior AAA hockey began to slowly wane. The NHL and juniors won out. The CHL's emphasis on education also led to more of its graduates continuing on in Canadian Interuniversity Sport. In some cities such Fredericton, N.B., with the New Brunswick Varsity Reds, or Thunder Bay with the Lakehead Thunderwolves, the CIS program became the big game in town.

A much greater mind than I could determine if the Allan Cup's loss of significance that ties in with globalization and post-industrialization. There are great exceptions, of course, but it is tougher to get people to turn out watch a local team live when they can watch the best in the world on their high-def TVs. The disappearance of good-paying manufacturing jobs in many parts of Canada could also mean towns where senior hockey once flourished can no longer attract potential players to their town and that the potential fanbase is reduced. (As an aside, Arden Zwelling made that connection brilliantly in a recent Sportsnet magazine feature on the declining interest in Indiana high school basketball.)

Yet senior hockey is hanging in there, although only a handful of teams in each province are still classified as senior AAA. It had a brief heyday during the 2004-05 NHL non-season when locked-out pros such as Arron Asham and Scott Walker signed on with senior teams.

That isn't to say it's not worthwhile. It is romantic, in a sense, that there is a hockey competition that gives communities such as Île-des-Chênes, Man., and Clarenville, N.L., a chance to be No. 1 in Canada. Any place that might be barely large enough to support a Tim Hortons has a shot if there's a rich guy who wants a new toy.

If there's a team to adopt in the Allan Cup, it's got to be the South East Prairie Thunder, who went 2-0 in the round-robin. Their leading scorer in the tournament, Brad Purdie, has been around so long that he was a freshman at Maine the season that Paul Kariya led the Black Bears to the NCAA Division I championship. Their coach is Jamie Leach, who got his name inscribed on the Stanley Cup as a member of the 1992 Pittsburgh Penguins, joining his father, 1970s Philadelphia Flyers star Reggie Leach. The Thunder lost in the final in overtime three seasons ago, so apparently they're due.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.