Classic? What Classic?

Canadians love the World Junior Hockey Championship because Canada often wins and usually has home ice advantage.

Fans also enjoy the wildly shifting fortunes of teenaged hockey. The junior tournament exposes the full range of adolescent brilliance and incompetence, panic and composure, cockiness and timidity - sometimes all in one shift.

Saturday's Canada-Russia semifinal had all that. It was a thriller with an unforgettable ending. But should we really be calling it "a classic"?

That makes it two "classics" in this tournament, the other being the Canada-USA showdown on New Year's Eve.

Both games were defined by mediocre goaltending, blown leads and turnovers galore. "We certainly were playing with our hearts, but not our heads," said the Canadian coach after watching his charges steal the Russian game.

Coaches are odd creatures. They love nothing more than a 2-0 win with an early goal, a late goal, and about 55 uneventful minutes.

Fans are in it for the drama, with it's gut-wrenching twists and turns and last-minute heroics. But does that make every comeback or frantic finish a classic, no matter how shoddy the performance? That likely depends on whether your team ends up on the winning side.

Having rope-a-doped its way to Monday's Gold Medal Game, Canada faces a team that has dismantled all in its path.

All signs suggest the ever-elusive Swedish championship might finally be at hand. If the Swedes win, perhaps in dramatic fashion, will the C word find its way into Canadian headlines on Tuesday morning? Or is classic defined only by the victors?

Photo: Sergei Andronov mourns Russia's fumbled opportunity.(Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images)