I was on a bus, headed for the first assignment of what was to become my career. The bus stopped in a small central-Ontario village at a tiny store. A black-and-white television was on in one corner. We stood, customers, passengers, clerks, breath held as one, as Forster Hewitt's familiar voice crackled all the way from Mowscow.

   "Here's another shot! Right in front! They score! Henderson has scored for Canada! Henderson right in front of the net and the fans and the team are going wild! Henderson right in front of the Soviet goal with 34 seconds left in the game!"

   Sept. 28, 1972. Final game, 19:26 of the third period. The precise moment all Canadians of a certain age know exactly where they were and what they were doing. That moment -- Henderson's winning goal in the 1972 Summit Series -- is to Canadians what the assassination of President Kennedy is to a generation of Americans, what the end of the war was to Europeans of an earlier age. Our defining moment.

   That magnificent image -- Henderson leaping into the arms of his Team Canada linemates -- has been the subject of books and documentaries; it has been captured on stamps and commemorative coins; but for most Canadians, it is unnecessary. The goal is now part of our genetic code, just as the game itself has always been in our blood.

   No one really knows exactly how or where the game of hockey began. There are art historians who believe that hockey shinny is being played in a 1565 painting by Pieter Bruegel, "Hunters In The Snow," that hangs in Vienna's famous Kunsthistorisches. There is also evidence that a game quite like hockey was played as early as 1800 in what is now known as Canada. Writing by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who taught at King's College School near Windsor, Nova Scotia, refer to schoolboys of the early 1800s 'hollerin' and whoopin' like mad with pleasure" as they skated on a frozen pond with sticks and a hard, round object.

   The first actual hockey game with stipulated rules -- was played on March 3, 1875, by McGill University students in Montreal, Quebec. And we know, too, that the Stanley Cup was purchased in 1893 for the extraordinary sum of 10 guineas by the governor general of Canada, Lord Stanley, and offered up to the best hockey club in the land. Today that $50 investment is the most-recognizable sports trophy in the entire world.

   Hockey has no James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. If it is a creation of any one thing, it is the work of an entire country. The Canadian climate gave hockey its first ice surfaces. The makeup of the people -- different cultures, different beliefs -- meant the hockey rink, not the church, became the central meeting place of the community, and the home team was where they kept the faith.

   Former Olympian Bruce Kidd once wrote, "In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive." So alive did it make Canadians feel that, in many instances, hockey took over their lives. It helps to be Canadian to understand what humorist Eric Nicol was getting at when he wrote, "For any God-fearing young Canadian, the ultimate reward is to be chosen for the NHL All-Star Game. If he later goes to Heaven, that is so much gravy."

   The great heroes of this young country have always been hockey players. When Montreal Canadiens great Howie Morenz died in 1937, thousands of mourning fans filed by his casket as he lay in state in the Montreal Forum. Morenz's star was followed by those of Maurice "Rocket" Richard, Gordie Howe, Jean Beliveau, Bobby Orr, Guy Lafleur, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros, Paul Kariya -- Canadians always convinced that, since hockey was their game, the greatest player in the game should be Canadian.

   "Hockey is Canada's game," Ken Dryden and I wrote in "Home Game." "It may also be Canada's national theatre... It is a place where the monumental themes of Canadian life are played out -- English and French, East and West, Canada and the U.S., Canada and the world, the timeless tensions of commerce and culture, our struggle to survive and civilize winter."

   Not surprisingly, Canada's game soon appealed to other countries trying to deal with the harsh winter climate. European hockey took the Canadian model and made significant changes in everything from style of play to size of rink. The Soviet Union developped the game in a vastly different way and yet was soon challenging Canada for world supremacy. The United States slowly came to the sport -- first in the northern states like Minnesota -- and by 1996 was good enough at the game to win the inaugural World Cup.

   In recent years, the Canadian game has become the world game. Not only is it played in Minnesota and Stockholm and Moscow, but there are thriving NHL franchises in warm weather cities like Anaheim, Phoenix and Miami, pickup games in Jerusalem, a hockey rink in Saudi Arabia and leagues in Australia and Japan. Eighteen countries are represented in this year's NHL, with more countries embracing hockey each year.

   Those youngsters who were "hollerin' and whoopin' like mad with pleasure" as they headed out onto the frozen Long Pond back in the 1800s could not possibly have foreseen what would become of their innocent play.

   All they could know was that they had found something very, very special, and that, from that point on, anyone who played it, or merely watched it, would fall in love with the most thrilling, exciting game that anyone -- or any nation -- has yet discovered.

Roy MacGregor is a hockey columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.