It wasn’t a game. It was a stress test.

Team Canada lined up against France in a matchup that had all the competitive tension of an automated software update. You knew it was coming, you knew how it would end, and you were mostly just waiting for the progress bar to hit 100 percent. But in the middle of this predictable slaughter, some legacy hardware found a way to remind us why we haven’t swapped it out for a newer model yet.

Sidney Crosby is the M1 chip of hockey. He’s been around long enough that we’ve started taking the performance for granted, yet he’s still outrunning the competition without breaking a sweat. During Canada’s systematic dismantling of the French squad, Crosby didn’t just play; he curated. He notched another record, further cementing his status as the most reliable architecture in the sport's history. It’s getting hard to keep track of the milestones. They pile up like unread notifications. At this point, Crosby isn't playing for the win—he’s playing for the archives.

Then there’s Connor McDavid. If Crosby is the refined legacy system, McDavid is the overclocked experimental rig that shouldn’t actually work in the real world. Watching him navigate the neutral zone is like watching a fiber-optic signal bypass a dial-up modem. He doesn’t just skate; he flickers. He was "wowing" the crowd, which is the sports journalism equivalent of saying a new OLED screen has "vibrant colors." It’s a lazy descriptor for a terrifying level of output. He treated the French defense like a series of minor bugs in an otherwise clean build.

And don’t forget the shiny new hardware: Macklin Celebrini. He’s the unicorn startup with a ten-billion-dollar valuation before he’s even shipped a product. The hype is suffocating. But unlike most Silicon Valley vaporware, Celebrini actually seems to have a functional API. He didn’t look like a teenager playing with men; he looked like a fresh OS install—snappy, optimized, and devoid of the bloatware that usually plagues rookies.

The score? It doesn't really matter. France was a sacrificial lamb offered up to the gods of international broadcast rights. The real story is the friction lurking beneath the surface of these blowouts.

We’re supposed to celebrate this dominance, but there’s a cost. The price tag for a "premium" international hockey experience has become absurd. If you wanted to watch this game legally, you likely navigated a labyrinth of flickering streaming apps and Tier 2 cable subscriptions that cost more than a mid-range GPU. And what do you get for that investment? A game that’s over by the first intermission, interrupted every three minutes by a gambling ad featuring a C-list celebrity telling you to "bet responsibly" while the screen flashes neon odds for the next goal.

It’s a bizarre trade-off. We get to witness the peak of human athletic engineering in McDavid and the historical weight of Crosby, but we have to consume it through a medium that feels increasingly like a digital strip mall. The jerseys—now manufactured by Fanatics—look like they were stitched together in a dark room by someone who’s only had the concept of "hockey" explained to them once. They’re $200 pieces of polyester that have the structural integrity of a wet paper towel. You’ll see the logos peel before the third period ends.

Canada won because Canada always wins these things. The talent gap isn't a gap; it’s a canyon. France played with heart, sure, but heart doesn't help when you're trying to defend against a three-line rotation of multimillionaires who have been groomed for this since they were in diapers. It was a blowout disguised as a "growth opportunity" for international hockey.

The stadium in Prague was loud, the beer was probably expensive, and the outcome was never in doubt. Crosby got his record. McDavid got his highlights. Celebrini got his "welcome to the big leagues" moment. The machine kept turning.

We’ll keep watching, of course. We’re suckers for the spec sheet. We want to see if McDavid can hit a higher clock speed or if Crosby’s battery life will ever actually start to degrade. We’ll pay the subscription fees and ignore the predatory betting ads because the product on the ice is still, somehow, better than the garbage fire of the world surrounding it.

But you have to wonder how long a sport can survive when the only thing more certain than a Canadian victory is the fact that you'll be asked to put ten dollars on the over-under before the puck even drops.

Is this still a game, or is it just a very expensive piece of content designed to keep us scrolling?