There are times when a willing suspension of disbelief helps.

Take the situation here in Windsor Friday yesterday morning, with traffic stopped while the town's ice-surfacing machine - an Olympia, though everyone calls it the "Zamboni" - rolls down the road and over the bridge while little children cheer and senior citizens wave tiny paper flags.

This town bills itself as "The Birthplace of Hockey," and if the Olympic Torch is going to burn along Water Street we better pretend the path forward is frozen.

It is a dicey issue, the origins of the national game.

Kingston, Ont., says it invented hockey. McGill University claims the first real game was played March 3, 1875. There is debatable evidence the Franklin Expedition soldiers were playing hockey earlier.

And, of course, Windsor claims that favourite local scribbler Thomas Chandler Haliburton took note of the boys of King's College School "hollerin' and whoopin' like mad with pleasure" as they skated on frozen Long Pond with things that looked like tree branches and a hard, round frozen object that may or not have dropped from a horse.

Europe, of course, can point to a 1565 painting by Pieter Bruegel - Hunters in The Snow - that certainly appears to contain a shinny game, but this story is about us, not them.

Windsor believes absolutely that the Olympic sport Canadians care most about started right here on Howard Dill's big pond. It is part of the lore of King's College School, now co-ed and known as King's Edgehill School.

"It's not part of the curriculum," says history teacher Kevin Lakes. "You don't have to teach it."

"It's understood," says biology teacher Frank Boothroyd.

The goalie for the school's women's team, Mallory Sanford, has been chosen to ride the Zamboni - sorry, Olympia - and the whole school has come out to cheer.

Three school players, Ben Ross, David Hatcher and Marshall Lane, all talk about how proud they are to be able to shovel off Long Pond in winter and skate where it all began.

But it doesn't mean as much to the increasingly international face of the school, the students from Taiwan and Germany who are now familiar classmates.

Rafael from Germany seems as excited as anyone, but when he explains how neat it will be to see one of the students "ride on the BolognaBalogna" it sort of loses a bit. ...

A willing suspension of disbelief also comes into play at nearby Grand Pré, where the torch caravan pulls in briefly at this moving National Historic Site dedicated to Acadian history.

There is a marvellous display to show the dikes the Acadians built to reclaim farmland from the marshes. There are the tragic stories of the slaughter of the British soldiers by the French that was largely blamed on conspiring Acadians, leading to an insistence of an oath of allegiance and, in 1755, to the shame of the Acadian expulsion.

But there is also the statue to Evangeline, the great Acadian heroine of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem of nearly a century later that told of Evangeline's and Gabriel's great love for each other, how they were separated during the deportation and how they searched for each other the rest of their lives, Evangeline only finding her Gabriel in the moments before his death.

Some come here to pray before this statue, even though she never existed.

Some cannot be convinced she is but a poetic creation. "Certainly not those from Louisiana," says interpretive guide Thérèse Thibodeau. "Oh no - they will tell you they know exactly where she is buried."

It takes a great leap of faith to believe some things, but this does not mean such leaps do not exist. The world is filled with them.

And this flame now heading across Canada may well be turning into one of them - may, in fact, already be one.

The facts of the flame are hardly as impressive as the impressions it leaves behind. The facts are that some 12,000 Canadian carriers will carry it some 45,000 kilometres, covering the farthest points east and west and, appropriately, the farthest point north.

If you do the math, you will see instantly the facts, though there are even some reporters recording this flame who believed it was actually being carried by foot such a distance.

Not even remotely so. It is carried far more by rubber wheels, carried more by wings. It is taken to population centres, dropped off, and carried by foot through communities where, increasingly, people appear to be turning out in numbers to cheer its very sight.

If it were carried by foot - even if the carriers ran, which most do not - it would likely take more than the four-year gap between games to get to where it must be come February.

And yet, the faces of those very young and even very old who come to watch it pass by certainly believe that this flame is being carried across a very large country to Vancouver. And as for those who carry this flame, no matter what you might wish to make of it, many of them end their "run" teary-eyed from other than the wind.

This is a country that in recent years has suffered a great loss of belief. It has happened in politics and in the economy and, most sadly, too often in the future itself.

But there is an incredible itch out there for something, anything, to believe in - and it just may be that this flame that some laugh at, some ridicule, some criticize and so very many come out to cheer is beginning to scratch that great itch.

No one can yet know. It will take weeks, perhaps months.

But what we do know is that Thomas Chandler Haliburton was right when he wrote this observation down that had absolutely nothing to do with hockey: "Facts are stranger than fiction."