"[There's] hockey night in Canada, and Don Cherry, who I would name the official God of the government," he says.

By contrast, many U.S. sporting events result in divisiveness signified by the "pennant race": two sub-divisions of a country pursuing the same goal. Consider the 1978 Red Sox and Yankees, who, in their struggle for American League East supremacy, embodied Athens and Sparta in their quest for hegemony over the Greek peninsula.

The U.S. reaction to hockey has produced two opposite products: people who are apathetic about professional hockey and a devotion to college hockey that is more fervent than in Canada.

"Here, you can walk around and some people couldn't name half the teams in the pro leagues," Mark Moore says. "It's a real different world. But there's a lot of enthusiasm at the college level here. Maybe at home it gets diluted with so many teams and games."

Such different national perceptions of a sport may make it difficult for a rivalry to develop. However, the increased enthusiasm for college sports in these here parts can only strengthen a most enjoyable and vital competition: Harvard-Yale.

"We're all Harvard-loyal first," Mark Moore affirms.

So, in the end, we see that the U.S.-Canadian border continues to lie dormant, while the Massachusetts and Connecticut border is gearing up for a Survivor Series.