All is forgiven. There was booing only for the Atlanta Braves and umpire Rick Reilly. You had to look hard to find an inverted Stars and Stripes.
The crowd at Toronto's SkyDome sang "O Canada" with Anne Murray as though they meant it - in English only - but a lot of them sang along with "The Star-Spangled Banner," too. The World Series has come to Canada for the first time, and any thought that it might turn nasty or political dissolved before Tuesday night's first pitch. (Game story on D1.)You will recall, of course, that on Sunday night, in Atlanta, at the second game of the Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Braves, a U.S. Marine guard marched onto the field, stood for the national anthems, then marched off, the whole time carrying the Canadian flag upside-down.
Tuesday, President Bush added his apologies to a long list, making this the greatest mass acknowledgment of Canada's existence by Americans in some time.
Tuesday night, the Marines landed again. But this time the stem of the maple leaf on the Canadian flag was down.
"To correct this unfortunate error and show their true respect for the Canadian people," the public-address announcer said, "the Marine guard has requested the privilege of again carrying the flag of Canada and have requested that the Stars and Stripes be carried by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police."
And just to make sure all remained convivial, any signs in the building deemed either overly offensive or overly inflammatory by Those Who Run The SkyDome were immediately taken down, decorum taking precedence over free speech in the quasi-public building.
"Obviously, if the flag is inverted, we'll take them down," said Howard Starkman, public relations director for the Blue Jays. "That's a disgrace. It's got to be stuff cheering for the Blue Jays. Political stuff we're taking down."
Thus concluded the international incident. Looking back, the most Canadian thing about all of it was that after the initial, understandable anger began to subside, there were all kinds of recriminations about whether we ought to care in the first place, a completely typical national crisis of confidence.
Heck, it was an honest mistake, after all, certainly no conspiracy, the isolated stupidity of a handful of people, and only little, timid, insecure countries get their shorts in a knot about their flag being hung upside-down in front of a few million people by accident.
(Of course, our Great Neighbor To The South is neither little nor timid, and had the situation been reversed, its great, confident, hyperpatriotic nose would have been massively out of joint.)
Sleeping with the elephant can get tricky sometimes. We want them to like us, to respect us. We'd rather they didn't treat us as though we live on Mars, as was the case in Atlanta. We'd hope that parading our flag around upside-down at the World Series merited more than a two-paragraph notebook item in USA Today the following morning.
But then, when they do finally notice our distress, like that elephant staring quizzically at an anthill he's just trod upon, our higher instincts take over. Geez, we didn't really mean to offend by being offended. Next time, we'll save the patriotic passion for where it belongs - really important hockey games.
And so now we can get back to being best of friends, to sharing the great unguarded border and especially to sharing that which both cultures hold so dear. You could see the fences being mended even as fans milled outside the SkyDome before the game.
Americans and Canadians jostled for position on a small covered plaza, the only area sheltered from the rain and wind, if not the cold.
A small group protested "500 Years of Stereotypes: From Columbus to the World Series," objecting specifically to the name of the Atlanta baseball team and to the "tomahawk chop" - an argument that knows no borders.
Most of the action, though, was reserved for the flag and T-shirt hawkers. A shirt with an inverted Stars and Stripes and the inscription "Sorry, Eh!" sold for about $10.
The maple leafs were right-side up, the Old Glories were inverted except for those sold by one vendor who peddled his right-side up, as though catering to a Fourth of July parade.
"I don't care what people do with them," he said when asked whether he was making a political statement. "I didn't bother turning them upside-down because it's hard to get the staples out."
Two nations, sort of divided, bound by the love of a buck.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.