That gold-medal game will also surely eclipse the single-game attendance record, set Friday when 19,622 fans jammed Scotiabank Place to watch Canada's 8-1 blowout of the Czech Republic.

That opening-night crowd surpassed the previous single-game record for the tournament, set in Calgary on Dec. 30, 1994, when 19,465 watched Canada play the Czechs.

The top 15 attendance records, no surprise, have all been set in Canada, a nation so mad for the game that the entire country prorogues for the two weeks following Christmas to watch children still dealing with acne handle spotlight so intense it would melt pucks.

It is not at all the same elsewhere. In Sweden, another country that supposedly loves this game, a mere 63,493 fans took in the tournament two years ago. But in Canada they not only come, they bring money. The tournament is expected to pump between $50-million and $60-million into the local economy.

The world's largest minor hockey tournament, the Bell Capital Cup, is under way in every other rink in the city. At a time when hockey tournaments are being cancelled in other cities because of the recession, 485 pee wee and atom teams, both boys and girls, have come here - including teams from China and Finland, as well as 70 from the United States - to pump another $14-million into the local economy.