I have to admit, I wasn’t planning on staying out to watch the concert but heading home to watch from the relative comfort of my sofa, but as they often do once beer and friends are introduced, plans for a quiet night in changed. Earlier in the day a friend dragged me out (thanks Lisa!) to go for drinks which landed us on a patio enjoying the early afternoon weather. This turned into watching the men’s soccer final (can we please have a final not be decided by penalties for a change? seriously), which turned into watching the entirety of the concert from the bar of a packed pub, and I’m so glad it did.

It wasn’t until I sat there listening as song after song came through the speakers that I realized just how much this group of 5 guys from Kingston, Ontario, has been an ever-present soundtrack that mark so many moments in not just my own, but likely the collective Canadian consciousness. You see, I’ve only owned two Tragically Hip albums in my lifetime (Up To Here, which I had on cassette, and Day for Night on CD), yet I knew almost every word to every one of the 32 songs played last night, and many of them have memories attached from my earliest days of high-school to college and beyond, The Hip really was always there.

For over 2.5 hours Gord Downie et al. said a heartfelt goodbye to their fans, and the emotion was palatable even from a bar stool in Oshawa over 200 kilometers away from the show. From the opening chords of Fifty Mission Cap to the closing of Ahead by a Century, they played their hearts out with a performance that will likely be remembered for years to come by anyone who watched it. It was, in the words of our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who was in attendance at the show donning a Tragically Hip t-shirt, “bittersweet”, and I don’t think anyone who watched would disagree with that as when all was said and done and they left the stage for the last time, I don’t think there was a completely dry eye in the house. I hope CBC releases the concert down the road for future viewing since I feel like we watched a live piece of Canadian history take place last night.

To Gord and the rest of the band, thank you. You’ll be missed.

If you’d like an exceptional take on the band and their final shows (which personally I couldn’t get through without tearing up), I highly recommend checking out this piece in The New Yorker by Stephen Marche.