Here’s hoping you enjoyed your Canada Day. If you’re a patriotic sports fan, however, there’s simply no way you could have. Let’s face it: as a country, we suck at sports right now. Forget “O Canada”.

Lately, it’s been “Woe Canada”. It’s cyclical and it won’t always be this way, but right now if you can find something—anything—to get excited about, please let the rest of us know.

The Stanley Cup went south of the border for the 14th straight season. The Memorial Cup followed suit. As a country, we couldn’t even win the World Hockey Championship—and it was played on our soil. A Russian walked off with the National Hockey League’s most valuable player award while a Swede was named the top playoff performer and an American was named rookie of the year. In fact, six of the eight major end-of-season awards handed out by the NHL last month were scooped up by non-Canadians.

The greatest piece of sporting Canadiana we have—the Canadian Football League—is operating under the dark cloud of an American invasion. Canada’s lone major-league baseball team is in turmoil, hasn’t been relevant for years, and will miss the playoffs for the 15th straight season.

And the many Canadians in the big leagues—Justin Morneau, Jason Bay, and Jeff Francis, to name a few—are all playing, but they aren’t enjoying nearly the success they have in recent years. Canada’s only NBA team was mediocre at best this past season and made a remarkably quick exit from the playoffs. And this country’s best basketball export, Steve Nash—and his Phoenix Suns—didn’t put up much of a fight and rolled over in the first round of the postseason.

The two biggest names in Canadian golf, Mike Weir and Stephen Ames, make oodles of money but capture few headlines and even fewer victories on the PGA Tour. But, hey, at least they have some sort of profile. Canadian women—once an emerging force in golf—have completely fallen off the map at the professional level. It’s probably time for the authorities to put out an all-points bulletin for Lori Kane.

It’s not much better in this country’s tennis scene. Frank Dancevic of Niagara Falls pulled off a first-round upset at Wimbledon on June 23, which, sadly, stands as the greatest accomplishment of any Canadian tennis player in the past decade.

And motor sports. Ah, yes, motor sports. Remember—and it wasn’t that long ago—when Canadian drivers and Canadian races were all the rage in racing? Recently, it’s been as if all of our top drivers have had their licences revoked.

Quite remarkably, it has come to this: Canada’s national men’s soccer team might just be the biggest source of sporting pride in the land these days—and our lads are ranked 60th in the world. But they’re getting results, and they’re doing it by entertaining and scoring goals, two concepts that have always seemed to elude Canadian soccer.

In fact, in its last four outings, Canada has won twice and managed a draw in another. On top of that, the squad has found the back of the net 11 times. There have been years—and not that long ago—when 11 goals would have been considered a decent annual total for Canadian soccer.

The good news in all of this is that recent wins over St. Vincent and the Grenadines (one of the few soccer-playing nations ranked lower than us) mean Canada’s national team is on to the next round of World Cup qualifying. The bad news is that our guys will now have to face countries people have actually heard of. But that’s for another day. In the big picture of Canadian sport these days—and in the absence of anything else to get fired up about—we ought, for the time being, to hitch our wagon to the soccer guys. Imagine that: Canada, a soccer country.

That pretty much tells you all you need to know. Things are a little lean right now, and there can be no debating that. That’s not to suggest it will always be that way, but if you’ve watched major sporting events recently, it’s clear that Canada just isn’t a player on the big stage.

However, with the Beijing Olympics now a month away, hopefully all of that is about to change. Certainly, it won’t take much success in China for Canadian athletes to make people across this land forget about what, to this point, has been a disappointing—bordering on dismal—2008.

Then again, the last time we sent our athletes to the Summer Games, they hardly took the world by storm. Four years ago in Athens, Canada managed only 12 medals (three gold, six silver, and three bronze), the country’s lowest haul since the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and 19th among the participating nations.

Obviously, we are not a summer-sport superpower, choosing instead to devote most of our time, energy, and resources to winter pursuits, especially with what’s to come in 2010. And on the surface, that’s understandable, given our history, geography, and climate.

But we are a developed nation of more than 33 million people, and we should be able to produce more than a few athletes who are the best in the world at what they do. It seems too often that we, as a country, accept being good instead of striving to be great.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting it all. And there’s nothing wrong with the rest of us, as a country, applying a little pressure on all of our athletes to deliver. At this point, Canada is crying out for a new sporting hero and a new source of national pride. There must be somebody out there who’s up to the challenge.