It didn't exactly scream "hit." The demo version someone plinked out on a piano for Ralph Mellanby and a handful of corporate sponsors back in 1967 sounded clunky and uninspiring — a sort of slow sister to the William Tell Overture. But Mellanby, a hotshot young director of what Canadians would soon know as Hockey Night in Canada, imagined the piece with full orchestration. And he heard virtue. "I was the only one," he now says, checking off the list of big-name sponsors who would need convincing before they gave the composition the green light. "Molson didn't like it. Imperial Oil didn't like it. Ford didn't like it at all."

But the composer was Dolores Claman, a 39-year-old jingle-writer who had gained minor fame for penning the theme for Ontario's pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. For the past six months, schoolchildren across the province had been singing its "Ontari-ari-ari-o" motif, and if the theme she'd written for hockey inspired half that response, Mellanby figured it could open his show for two, possibly three seasons. In the TV world, that is a long and happy life.

Forty-one years later, those "dunt-da dunt-da-dunts" are burned into the national consciousness — an on-air calling card that has brought the CBC more recognition than Peter Mansbridge or its "exploding 'c' " logo. High-school bands play it from sheet music. It is consistently among the 50 top-selling cellphone ring tones in the country. David Mills, a professor of Canadian history, recalls a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a lone Canadian at Oktoberfest in Munich, rising to his feet and singing a few dunt-dah-dahs for the benefit of the beer-hall crowd. Soon a dozen or so of the Canuck's countrymen scattered around the tent had joined in, roaring out the notes to the bemusement of their European drinking mates. "For anyone under the age of 50, it is the one song that they remember," says Mills. "The song comes on, and that means the hockey game is about to start on Saturday night."

It is the sort of response — emotive, spiritual, Pavlovian — that money can't buy. So hockey fans can be forgiven a moment of slack-jawed amazement this week upon learning that someone had, well, bought it. The news came Monday by way of a CTV press release announcing that the privately owned network had acquired full rights to Claman's piece after negotiations between her and the CBC collapsed. Rick Brace, CTV's president of revenue, business planning and sports, declined to say how much the network paid. But insiders say Claman, now 80 and living in London, received upwards of $2.5 million, having refused a $1-million offer from the public broadcaster late last week.

For CTV, the move was a no-brainer: the network's sports channel TSN, along with its French-language service RDS, had spent years trying to build the sort of affinity with viewers that Claman's song epitomizes. "This theme is part of the fabric of the country," Brace told Maclean's following the announcment. "It's an institution, and any time you can engage your audience on that level you do it. That's how you build a brand."

Why the CBC would let it slip away is a puzzle for the ages. After years of trading on the cultural significance of its broadcast, the corporation appeared determined last week to jettison the hymn that called their fans to communion. On Friday, executives breezily announced a $100,000 contest to come up with a new theme, as if 41 years of tradition could be replaced in a summer jingle-off. A barrage of 1,500 calls and emails from angry viewers gave them pause, and on Monday they announced they wished to reopen talks with the help of a mediator. Yet, in words and in actions, CBC managers rejected the notion that the soul of the broadcast could be tied up in a few bars of music. "What Hockey Night in Canada is really about is hockey," Scott Moore, the executive director of CBC Sports, told one reporter. "Everything else is just window dressing."

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