The Calgary Flames will carry the hopes of a hockey-crazed nation when they face off against Tampa Bay Lightning Tuesday, in a best of seven game series.

It's the first time since 1994 a Canadian-based team has had a chance to lift the fabled Stanley Cup, seen by many observers as the toughest trophy to win in professional sport.

This will be a ball with two Cinderellas, as Calgary and the Lightning, from steamy Florida, are possibly the two most unfancied teams ever to reach the finals.

"Fiercely, fiercely, proud," said hockey historian and author Kevin Shea, describing Canada's attitude to the upstart Flames.

"Right now the big rallying cry is, the 'C' on the front of (Calgary's) sweaters, stands for Canada," Shea, who also works at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, told AFP.

Each Flames playoff win has sparked frenzied celebrations in Calgary, with up to 30,000 fans thronging the streets, as their heros dispatched fancied Vancouver, Detroit and San Jose.

Thousands of team sweaters and car flags have painted the town red, and even sprung up in other Canadian cities.

Calgary's dream run is remarkable, given that several times in recent years the Flames, hit by a weak Canadian dollar, and runaway NHL salaries, looked on the verge of leaving town.

"Not only are we representing Calgary, but Canada. And it's an opportunity that doesn't come very, very often," said Flames gamebreaker Martin Gelinas.

Despite the fact that 24 of the 30 NHL franchises are south of the border, and the league has scores of foreign players, Canadians still cherish hockey as their own.

"We still look at the game as a Canadian game. If your favorite Canadian team is out, you find the next Canadian team to cheer for," Shea said.

Calgary's run has seen the equivalent of hell freezing over, as fans from hated local rival Edmonton have climbed aboard the bandwagon.

That's tantamount to a Boston Red Sox fan rooting for the Yankees in the World Series, or an Australian cheering England to win the Ashes.

Outsiders struggle to comprehend hockey's hold on Canada, where the game is part religion, part community glue, and a touchstone of national identity.

Canada's national teams currently hold the Olympic and World Championship titles for both men and women : the game is played on every frozen pond, and in ramshackle arenas in even the tiniest communities.

But many Canadians, who in the last decade have seen two National Hockey League franchises, the Winnipeg Jets and the Quebec Nordiques migrate south, feel big money in the United States has stolen their game.

Canadians brought up on dynasties like the Montreal Canadiens and Wayne Gretzky's Edmonton Oilers, have chafed as teams from non-hockey hotbeds like Dallas and Colorado drink from the Stanley Cup.

The last Canadian team to play for the Stanley Cup was Vancouver in 1994, the last to win it was Montreal, a year before.

Turn on any sports radio station in early summer in the United States, and the talk will be almost exclusively about the National Basketball Association playoffs, or baseball's early skirmishes.

But the US-Canadian border cuts right across sporting preferences.

Canadian television ratings suggest up to three million people have watched playoff each games involving the Flames, from a country of 30 million people.

In the United States, where hockey lags behind football, basketball, baseball, auto racing and college sports, television ratings have been paltry.

But in Canada, the NBA's Miami-Indiana conference final last week drew a meagre 38,000 viewers on one cable sports network.

The US-Canada gulf over hockey has been particularly marked this year.

Canadians were forced to sit by in March as US pundits lashed their rugged national sport as an "affront to sport" stained by "frontier justice" and a "nightmare in the family living room."

Vitriol spilled after the Vancouver's Todd Bertuzzi, punched Colorado's Steve Moore, felling him and breaking vertebrae in his neck during a game.

Even as they savour Calgary's dreams, Canadian hockey fans are trying not to think about the labour doomsday looming for the league in September.

There may be no NHL season in 2004-5 as owners, demanding cost certainty, clash with richly paid players opposed to a salary cap.

TERRA.WIRE