Folks, let me tell you about a conversation that reportedly happened between a 19-year-old hockey player and his father on the eve of the biggest tournament in the sport.
"They wouldn't bring me all that way," Macklin Celebrini asked, "not to play me, right?"
"I'm pretty sure you're going to play," his father Rick Celebrini told him. "I don't think you have to worry about that."
That's the story of the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics in miniature. Young and old. Nervous and reassuring. The torch being handed from one generation to the next, at the biggest hockey event on the planet.
For the first time in what feels like forever, the NHL is back at the Olympics. The best players in the world are in Milan, Italy, competing under their national flags, and if you've missed this - if you've been sleeping on what's happening across the Atlantic right now - wake up. Because what is coming out of these Games is the kind of hockey content that makes you remember why you fell in love with the sport.
Celebrini, the San Jose Sharks phenom who was the first overall pick in last year's draft, is getting his Olympic moment. At 19 years old, playing for Team Canada, in a tournament where the expectations for Canadian hockey are always the highest in the world. The pressure he's carrying would buckle most veterans. But the kid from Vancouver - raised by a father who served as the strength and conditioning coach for the Vancouver Canucks and later a team physiotherapist for the Golden State Warriors - is built for exactly this.
And then there's Pierre-Edouard Bellemare. The veteran French forward has announced this will be his farewell Olympic Games - a final swan song for one of the most beloved figures in French hockey history, a player who built his entire international legacy on representing a nation that rarely gets the spotlight in this sport. For France, watching Bellemare take his final bow in Milan is the kind of moment that transcends the sport and becomes a cultural touchstone.
Quarterfinal tickets? Already sold out. The world has been waiting for this. The argument that Olympic hockey without NHL players was still good hockey was technically true - the tournament was always competitive, always worth watching. But the argument that this - the absolute best players, the national pride stories, the generational matchups - is in a different category entirely? That argument wins in a landslide.
I was doing radio when the NHL pulled out of the Olympics the first time. I watched that decision with genuine sadness. Because the Olympics are where sports transcends the business of sports - where it becomes something bigger, something that reaches people who never watch a regular season game.
Now that it's back? The sport should never let it go again.
That's what sports is all about, folks.
