IIHF World Hockey Championship not a true barometer for Canada’s place in the puck universe

Quick, now, name the top four or five Team Canada hockey moments of your lifetime. Now, name the top four or five disappointing Team Canada moments of your life.

Depending on your age, fond memories like the 1972 Summit Series, the 1976 and 1987 Canada Cups might come immediately to mind, along with the 2002 and 2010 Olympic Games.

Disappointments? Right away I thought of the 1998 and 2006 Olympics, the 1981 Canada Cup and the 1996 World Cup of Hockey. Sprinkle in - every single time, it seems - the occasions when the juniors didn't win a gold medal and the modern pantheon of critical Canadian hockey moments becomes fairly clear as well as complete.

Not a single World Hockey Championship moment comes to my mind until I really start to engage in searching the crevices and cobweb-laden corners of my hockey memory bank.

Even at that, I find myself needing to hit the internet to jog those memories, to see if I have them correct. Or even what year they happened. Anson Carter's overtime goal in the gold medal game against the Swedes, in 2003, appeared in foggy fashion as I taxed my brain for World Hockey Championship relevance. It popped up, largely, because of the fact that his goal was in doubt for the longest video review I've ever seen. I confirmed the fact that it happened in 2003, not with the ease of recall that 1972, 1976, 1987, 2002 and 2010 provide for me, but by a quick google search.

This isn't sour grapes over Canada's third straight quarterfinal loss at the World Hockey Championships, falling 4-3 to a resilient and plucky Slovakian national squad.

That's because the tournament has never really resonated with me as an important bellwether on the state of Canadian hockey, or of world hockey, really. Outside of the countries that don't make a dent in the average NHL roster, no one is sending their most powerful squads to these events, chock full of their top stars.

For that reason, it's never been the barometer of annual hockey glory that it could be, if it were held at a time when all of the top hockey nations could ice all of their best players.

Nice to win a World Championship? Sure. Better than winning a Spengler? Absolutely. Devastating to lose it? Hardly.

It would be surprising if today's loss finds commentators crying out about the state of Canadian hockey. There should not be much handwringing over this and that's because we still see our reflections in the glow of Sidney Crosby's golden goal. We feel good about Canadian hockey right now and the World Championship just does not have the power to change that feeling. Lose a couple more junior gold medals and flop at Sochi (should NHL players actually take part), and then you might see enough traction to convene the big brains of the hockey world in order to address the national shame.

That's what happened in 1999, when then-president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Ken Dryden, spearheaded a very public initiative to, in essence, repair Canada's hockey pride and ensure a return to glory. That initiative, by the way, was spurred on by failures at the 1996 World Cup and 1998 Nagano Olympics, as well as what had become dreadfully stagnant NHL hockey. Mixed in with that era was a gold medal for Canada, at the 1997 World Hockey Championship. That success carried not nearly enough weight to stave off those high level meetings on the "sorry state" of Canadian hockey. Another indicator as to the also-ran status of the World Championship.

There are those who see Canada's ouster as a real problem moving forward, as this tournament sets the pool grid for the 2014 Olympic Games.

Due to its failure to crack the final four, Canada will indeed be placed in what is expected to be a "tougher" pool at Sochi. Not much to fret about there, either. Remember Canada's round robin loss to the United States at the 2010 Olympics? It pushed them into a "tougher" playoff pool where they were forced to meet a high-flying Russian team in the quarterfinals. That wasn't the plan. They were supposed to have an easier road to meeting Russia in the final. There was no shortage of fear and loathing of the situation, yet Canada passed that test pretty well, flattening the Russians 7-3. And onward to gold.

Good pool, bad pool, easy pool, tough pool. There really isn't much to choose between the top five or 6 hockey nations on the planet these days and we all know it. Canada's positioning in a slightly tougher group will be just that. Slightly tougher. Should that add a tasty chapter on the way to another Olympic gold medal, as it did in 2010, that would only make the glory of it all a little sweeter. Or the pain a little more acute, should they fail.

Then, once again, we'll add another vivid memory of Canadian hockey supremacy, or of Canadian hockey disappointment to the "handy recall" section of our brain's library. That will be another giant moment in Canadian hockey history. The kind you just don't get at the annual Spring meet.

Three consecutive quarterfinal losses at a World Championship shouldn't really alarm anyone. Nor will they find a place of prominence in anyone's Canadian hockey memories.

Canada lost? That's a shame. When's the next Stanley Cup game on?