TeeVee

From Truth and Rumours, via Kukla's Korner:

The Olympic hockey gold medal thriller on Sunday pulled in a record television audience in Canada.

A total of 16.6 million viewers watched Canada’s 3-2 overtime win against the United States, the largest viewership ever for a telecast on Canadian television.

[...]

CTV reports that 80 per cent of Canadians (26.5 million) watched some part of the game.

The Canadian numbers are to be expected, no?  This, OTOH, is MOST interesting:

In the United States,  NBC earned a 17.6 overnight rating (percentage of potential households tuned in) for the Canada-U.S. game.

That rating, SportsBusiness Daily reports,  represents a 45 per cent increase over the rating for 2002 Salt Lake final also between Canada and United States.

It also ranks third highest among NFL regular season telecasts in 2009. It’s also higher than the rating for a World Series game dating back to 2004 and every NBA Finals game since 1998.

About damned time.  I find the US results oh-so-gratifying but I don't expect a great upsurge in either hockey coverage or hockey fans.  One would follow the other and both would be nice.  But I'm not holding my breath.

Don't despair, Gentle Reader.  We're just about done with hockey until the playoffs begin in late April.  To your everlasting relief, I would suppose.  We'll be back to boring you with conservative political rants and photographs of our daily beer and cigar consumption in short order.

Image from here.