Nobody takes a defeat in hockey quite the same way Canadians do – and a loss to the US is not like any other loss
Dejected Canadian fan
A dejected Canadian fan watches the mens' ice hockey game between Canada and the US. Photograph: Daniel Karmann/EPA

Before the start of the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, told Sports Illustrated, "Although there are important sports in Canada – our own football, lacrosse – nothing does compete with hockey. It's on a different plane, to the extent where, rightly or wrongly, people see these sports as deeply reflective of the character of the nation." On Sunday afternoon, that sense of national identity took a direct hit from a usual suspect: the United States.

Few would question Harper's quote; hockey (no need to mention the playing surface here) isn't simply a sport to most Canadians – it's our sport, invented and perfected on the thousands of ice rinks that dot the country during its usually long and frigid winters. And because Canadians have generally hitched our feelings of national identity to a game, we are perpetually dealing with a crisis. Nobody wins every time, and nobody takes a loss in hockey quite the same way Canadians do.

It's a generalisation to say that all Canadians are hockey mad, or care about the millionaire players that dominate the sports page, but much as it is with football in the UK, hockey in Canada is a part of the national psyche. More than bilingualism or healthcare, hockey is the only defining feature of Canadian nationality that rivals Not Being American. And due to the lack of many other strong national symbols, it's been up to hockey to fill that deep void, and give the sparse, separated population of Canada a sense of belonging and community. When football fans talk to one another, they find a shared interest that defies national borders. But often, Canadians don't just recognise a sports fan the instant the words "Sid the Kid" are mentioned, or when someone knows that "icing" isn't something you put on a cake – we see a compatriot.

Sunday's loss to the young, quick, fore-checking, Americans, was in some ways simply yet another chapter in the on-going cross-border hockey saga, which has seen Canada's game exported and packaged by American brains, and sold successfully to foreign markets – most of which are now rivalling Canada's talent and stealing away our dominance.

But, predictably, there is much more to it than that. A loss to the US is not like any other loss. Even falling to the Russians is more tolerable, because if nothing else, at least we respect them. A US win over Canada taps into a much deeper line of national anxiety – one in which Canada's shaky notions of its own place in the world come to the fore.

The endless dominance of the United States in all facets of Canadian life has given this country a perpetual younger sibling neurosis that constantly reinforces its own insecurities. It has left us convinced that the only way to get one over on the Yanks is to trounce them on the ice. This is why Canada's gold medal victory over the US in 2002 will forever hold a high spot in Canadian lore: not only did Canada beat the Americans, but we did it on their turf. Now, Canadians are fighting the rising fear that this time, the result might be reversed – a feeling that's even more pronounced since the Canadian junior men's team lost to the US at the world championship in January. In Saskatchewan.

In the end, this realisation of the fact that even at its own sport – one at which it has long been king – Canada can lose with the worst of them, speaks to another, more muted Canadian trait: that of humility. Always winning feels great, but feeling great about winning is hardly what Canadians are known for. When our women's hockey team trounced Italy 16-0 at the Turin Games in 2006, national hockey commentator Don Cherry said, "To run up the score like that, that is wrong. It is not the Canadian way." That suggests (possibly very accurately) that the "Canadian way" is to win by a slim margin, or, alternatively, spend months reviewing and discussing an unexpected loss.

In any event, there will be another chance for the Canadian men's hockey team – this time against Germany. Assuming that's as easy a victory on the ice as it appears on paper, Canada will face Russia, a match-up that many hoped would be for the gold medal before both powerhouses were humbled in the group stage. And as fears grow about a repeat of the men's result in Turin (a seventh-place finish), it's clear that the only thing that will bring Canada back from the brink of an identity crisis is a gold medal. Anything else will only remind us that when we had to be, we weren't as good as the Americans.