VANCOUVER — The IOC calls it “ice” hockey, and, after the first few days of the Olympics lying dormant, it is now here.

Even though many of the arena’s corporate suites were gaping with absent patrons on the first day of play, the crowd for Canada-Norway was heated and frenzied, despite the lack of drama that comes whenever a minnow is dropped into shark tank.

If the Games — and Canada’s early medal run — had already filled the country with teeming pride, the hockey games look to push it over the edge.

In one instance, I stood in a concession line when a young woman asked her friend how Canada’s speed staking women had done that morning. The friend told her, “bronze,” and the woman said something that heretofore had never been spoken in the great white north: “Bronze? Eeeeew.”

In “ice hockey,” Canada is expected to, if not win, then at least reach the tournament final. But one broadcaster I met questioned the team’s ability to rise above themselves. Having visited the players in the dressing room, he thought that they looked uptight. When I asked him how he thought they were supposed to look, he answered: “Playing at home is supposed to help you, not hurt you, but it’s Canada, it’s hockey. You don’t need to put any extra pressure on yourself.”

The players had no time to distract themselves from this pressure, having committed to playing out the middle chunk of the NHL schedule with their club teams until the day before the beginning of their national team duties, but this wasn’t the case for management.

A few nights prior to the first game, Hockey Canada’s Bob Nicholson and his staff could be seen outside the Fairmont Pacific Rim at 3 a.m. smoking cigars and talking about whatever Canada’s hockey leaders talk about while standing a few hundred feet from the Olympic cauldron, which, from a distance, looked like the kind of fire that inadequate woodsmen like myself had tried to build, but failed.

The Pacific Rim — a glassy new hotel with an atmosphere as cold as its lobby was big and gorgeous — was home for the coaches and their families.

I settled one night in the lobby bar alongside Oiler president Kevin Lowe, a friend of a friend, whose job, it seemed, was to remain composed amid the over-zealousness that affects our country in these times.

Having participated as a manager in two previous Olympics, Mr. Lowe had been too busy to know the event the way a tourist or fan might. But because the Games were in Vancouver, he’d brought his entire family with him to experience it before the hockey madness took hold. His reasons for this were many, not the least being that his wife, skier Karen Percy-Lowe, had won two medals at the 1988 Calgary Games.

He seemed determined to experience something greater than just wins and losses, and before taking his kids to watch the Opening Ceremonies, he told them: “This is what your mom experienced. And now, in a way, you can experience it, too.”

The Percy-Lowe family aren’t that different than yours or mine, despite their athletic pedigree. Kevin grew up in Lachute, Que., outside of Montreal, and learned French having captained the Remparts at 16. Karen, on the other hand, was total Alberta — born and raised in Banff — and together, their family was a tapestry of solitudes woven into one.

Still, their achievements had largely been communicated to their children through a handful of anecdotes, a quilt work of battle scars, and a few photos hanging on the wall: one parent holding a trophy, the other biting a medallion. But now, in Vancouver, this past was coming alive for them. Even if the team for whom he was partly responsible — Team Canada 2010 — failed to produce a sporting legacy, Mr. Lowe wanted to establish one for his family.

While calling the downhill races for CTV, Ms. Percy-Lowe also had concerns other than sport. A few years ago, she started a charitable foundation and adjunct of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeepers’ program, wholly supporting the work of the Saskatchewan Riverkeeper, who, like thousands of other Keepers worldwide, pressures governments and corporations into cleaning up waterways.

So it was that one recent afternoon, Mr. Lowe, after greeting Team Canada’s arriving players, met my friend, Mark Mattson, the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, to discuss a future charity hockey event that would raise money for their cause. From both parents, their message was clear: life should not only be measured by a tournament score.

Over the next week, as we live and die with the fortunes of Canada’s hockey team through a tournament that they should win, they must win, they have to win, it’s the kind of advice that, as life advances beyond the Games, we might all consider taking to heart.