The Tricolore

Before

Before the disaster, sports were popular in the West. In the United States, people of all types gathered around a TV every February to watch the American football championship, which they called the Super Bowl. Their summer sport was baseball, and it was a competition among children and adults to catch the ball when it soared into the stands. In Canada, hockey was an activity enjoyed by almost every citizen. It was a rough sport played on a sheet of ice, and the players had to skate on sharp blades.

It was this exact sport that caused the problem.

On June 10, 2048, the Boston Bruins won their tenth Stanley Cup. It caused some minor discomfort in fans of rival teams, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The next year, the Bruins went back-to-back. In 2050, Boston became the Cup Champions once again. When this happened, the unsettlement among rival fans grew. The last "three-peat," as they called it, had been in the 1980s. People who had spent their entire lives cheering for the Toronto Maple Leafs or the Montréal Canadiens demanded a new champion, but there was nothing anyone could really do. Boston was just too talented.

Bruins fans who got word of the discomfort of Maple Leafs and Canadiens fans just laughed and declared that the others were upset that their teams were not as good. In 2057, Boston won their sixth Stanley Cup in ten years. This time, people who hated Boston hockey had had it, and they rioted. Fires and destruction spread across the entire United States as well as southern Canada. The Stanley Cup Riots of 2057 became the first hockey-related protests to kill people when it resulted in 163 deaths.

Citizens who did not want to participate begged their governments to do something about the riots when they had gone on for over a month following the final game of the championship. So the governments did as the governments usually do: they went to the extreme. All major competitive sports were banned.

The sudden rule change didn't make sense to most people, but they were law-abiding citizens, so they followed through with the new law. Everyone was stripped of their jerseys and team shirts. They were forced to give up team merchandise, even valuable items such as footballs signed by Jerry Rice or game-winning Wayne Gretzky pucks. Arenas, fields, and stadiums stayed up when their teams were all declared defunct, but they were mostly used as warehouses rather than sporting venues.

A couple diehard sports fans dared to speak up, but they were told that if they watched any sports on television or owned anything related to sports, they would be arrested. That silenced most protesters, and the few that chose to fight back again were hauled off to jail for up to ten years.

Some folks hid their most valuable jerseys and other sports items in locked safes deep in their basements or bomb shelters, refusing to give up cherished memories. One of these people was an old man from a place in Canada once known as British Columbia. He had been named Bernard at his birth seventy-two years ago but had been handed the ID scanner and number 715401-7 during the Reassignment of 2036, when everyone was implanted with ID scanners and numbers for people to identify them by instead of using names.

Bernard cherished his old Shea Weber jersey from when he was a younger man. Shea was about his age, and he had been Bernard's favorite player from a hockey team besides the Vancouver Canucks since the Nashville Predators traded him to the Montréal Canadiens. Bernard knew he wasn't about to give Shea's jersey up, so he locked it in his basement and told his daughter to pass it down in the family until sports returned for good.

His forty-year-old daughter, whose real name was Lily, accepted her father's wish despite her fear of being caught with a sports jersey. When Bernard died twenty years later, she gave it to her son, number 183694-8. Twenty years after that, when his own son, 239272-6, turned eighteen, he decided to pass it on to yet another generation. The young adult immediately recognized the jersey of the old Canadiens as his most prized possession.

No one knew yet that 239272-6's admiration of the jersey would change the Western world, nor that it would bring back sports for good, but they would know soon.

Specifically, they would all know in about sixteen more years.