Just how Canadian is the Tragically Hip? Well, the band started its set on Thursday night at Wetlands with “Fireworks,” in which the singer is astonished to meet a girl who couldn’t care less about hockey. “I never saw someone say that before,” he marvels.

• Jon Pareles of The New York Times reviews an appearance by The Tragically Hip at the Manhattan rock club Wetlands Preserve, July 28, 1998. Also noted: “Gordon Downie, the band’s lead singer, sounds frustrated but dogged, an Everyman whose consolation, as he sang in ‘Springtime in Vienna,’ is that ‘We live to survive our paradoxes.’” (Oh, and the girl? What the girl said, of course, was that she didn’t give a fuck about hockey.)