Manitoba’s best young athletes, including nearly 100 from The Carillon’s coverage region, will be in Thompson next week for the Manitoba Winter Games.

Sports at the games include skiing, archery, badminton, curling, figure skating, futsal, gymnastics, hockey, ringette, speed skating and wrestling.

The province is divided into regions, with some area athletes suiting up for Team East and some for Team South. The games begin March 1, with athletes between 10 and 17 participating.

Hockey has the most athletes from Eastman set to play, with 24 total athletes set to make the trip up North.

If there’s one thing that the Olympic semi-finals showed, it’s that the NHL must immediately change their offsides review process.

Canada scored a memorable winner against Finland in the semi-finals, but Finland challenged for offside in desperation, for a zone entry nearly a minute before Nathan MacKinnon’s strike.

The offsides review process was put into place after a linesperson missed a call by three feet on a breakaway pass. It should not be used to challenge millimetre calls for goals that were scored minutes later.

This isn’t to call out Team Finland for challenging, under the rules it was 100 per cent the correct decision and gamble, even when they got a two minute bench minor for getting the challenge wrong, with 30 seconds to go, it was a better chance to reverse that call than score with 30 seconds.

Heartbreak. Anguish. Grief. Despair. Disbelief. After 12 long years of eagerly waiting for best-on-best Olympic hockey, the hockey gods had it in for the clearly superior Canadian squad. Our arch rivals beat us in overtime, proving that sport, like life, isn’t always fair.

Team USA needed a miracle to win their last gold medal in 1980 and they needed another miracle to win Olympic gold in 2026.

Canada was clearly the better team. No rational hockey fan could look at that gold medal game and say the best team won.

If it was a best of seven series, Canada would win decisively. (Speaking of which, let’s have another Summit Series like we had in 1972, only this time it should be Canada versus the U.S. It would be epic.)

After Canada’s first game at the Olympics was finished, an image dominated social media. Team Canada’s fourth goal against Czechia was scored by Nathan MacKinnon and assisted by Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby.

That boxscore entry was a stark reminder that we’ve been without true best-on-best hockey for too long, and Canada’s early brilliance has been impressive to watch. (Thankfully this column didn’t need updating after an overtime win against Czechia in the quarterfinals early on Feb. 18)

Most hockey fans point to the NHL as the reason for the lack of a best-on-best tournament, and no doubt, they share part of the blame for that, but they are not the main entity I blame.

The International Ice Hockey Federation has to be the main culprit. Imagine if FIFA, the governing body for soccer, organized the World Cup during the final weeks of play in the Premier League?