Bibliographic record
Abstract
Roy MacGregor is perhaps the most prolific of Canadian writers to use hockey as the subtext and text for his writing. His most well-known work, The Home Team: Fathers, Sons, and Hockey, succinctly, is an intimate portrait of the father-son bond in and through the game of hockey. More sweeping in national scope and significance of hockey is Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada which MacGregor co-authored with hockey legend Ken Dryden. Least well known, though acclaimed by academics to be one of the very best novels on sport, is The Last Season. The latter is a poignant description of jaundiced hockey goon, Felix Batterinski. Finally, MacGregor has authored 21 adolescent novels (and a companion Scrapbook) in a series entitled The Screech Owls, a fictional co-ed team of players. The series has garnered MacGregor several major writing awards. The Screech Owl books were the first adolescent-level narratives to be popularized after Scott Young’s Scrubs on Skates series from the 1950s and re-published in the 1980s. This paper examines MacGregor’s hockey fiction (and his non-fiction, to a lesser extent) from the lens of his treatment and portrayal of the family and its place in the pantheon of hockey, at least in MacGregor’s perspective. From the dysfunctional Batterinski family contextualized in northern Ontario and within a Polish ethnic background to the concept of father:son in The Home Team to the notion of families in selected examples from the Screech Owl series, this analysis explores the mirror held up to the hockey family by one of Canada’s best ‘hockey’ novelists. Using literature to examine the concept of family construction and portrayal is an important revelation of the truth that emanates from fiction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".