I live on the North Shore, and like a lot of people up here I have a complicated relationship with the bridge. Most days it is the thing standing between me and the rest of the city. On Thursday afternoon it was the easiest crossing I have made in years, because on the far end of it Canada was about to win a World Cup match for the first time in the country’s history.
It did. Six to nothing over Qatar at BC Place, a Jonathan David hat trick, the first World Cup hat trick scored on home soil by anyone since 1966. Cyle Larin opened the scoring. Nathan Saliba added one. 52,497 people, a good number of them North Shore families who had made the same short crossing I did, lost their minds in the best possible way.
I want to write about that afternoon, but not from inside the stadium. I want to write about it from up here, on the North Shore, where a day like Thursday actually lands.
Drive past any field in North or West Vancouver on a Saturday morning and you already know what this community does with its weekends. Our pitches are full. Full of seven-year-olds in shin pads three sizes too big, teenagers who treat a league game like a cup final, parents standing in the rain with travel mugs because that is the job. Soccer is the sport our kids actually play here, in numbers, every weekend, for years.
So when the national team wins its first World Cup match in history, in our own backyard, in a stadium you can pick out from the right hill up here, every kid who laced up on a North Shore pitch this spring just watched their ceiling lift. For one afternoon, the thing they do every Saturday was the most important thing happening in the country, and they got to watch their own players do it twenty minutes from home.
I keep coming back to those kids when I think about the other moment from Thursday, the one that had nothing to do with goals. Late in the game Qatar’s Assim Madibo caught Ismael Kone from behind and Kone’s leg gave out under him. He was carried off on a stretcher. The whole building went quiet, the way a room full of strangers does when it remembers all at once that the person on the ground is somebody’s kid. Then Kone lifted a thumbs up, and the place roared.
A few minutes later Saliba, the man who had come on to replace him, curled in a free kick and ran straight to the boards holding Kone’s number 8 shirt over his head.
If you spend Saturdays on a sideline, you know exactly why that matters more than the scoreline. Every kid in that stadium, and every kid watching at home on the North Shore, saw the same thing the rest of us did. You play for the person next to you. You stand still when someone is hurt. You carry the teammate who cannot carry himself. You can run a hundred drills and not teach that as clearly as one afternoon at BC Place taught it on Thursday.
The North Shore can feel like its own small world, walled off from the city by a stretch of water and a bottleneck of traffic. On Thursday it did not feel separate at all. We were in the same room as everyone else, making the same sound, watching the same young man give a thumbs up from a stretcher.
There is a reason to keep paying attention. Canada plays Switzerland on June 24, same building, and a win or a draw keeps the team in Vancouver. That means another short crossing, and another chance to take a North Shore kid across the bridge and show them that the biggest stage in the world is, for a few more weeks, right next door.
The team looks like it intends to make the most of its second chance. We should make the most of ours, and bring the kids.
Al Vigier lives in Upper Lonsdale and is the founder of Caseway.
