The next lacrosse franchise should be awarded to Phoenix, because the sport always rises from its own ashes.

"It's amazing. It dies, then it just comes back again," says Ray Polawski, President of the Hamilton Minor Lacrosse Association. There is something mystical in the way Canada's national summer game undergoes unaccountable sudden surges of popularity, followed by equally puzzling flatbeds of apathy.

But perhaps a tinge of the supernatural should be expected, given the game's spiritual origins with the Iroquois Confederacy. No other team sport has such deep Canadian roots as lacrosse, which was belatedly designated by the Sports Act of 1994 as one of our two national games.

Hockey became our winter sport out of communal environmental experience. Lacrosse became our summer national sport out of perseverance and inherited memory. It is a fluid, skill-demanding physical, three-dimensional game.

But it has survived in spite of often being its own worst enemy.

Lacrosse's peaks and valleys of public acceptance stretch back to Confederation and have been so prevalent that today, even with lacrosse back in vogue, organizers can't help but worry that another near-fatal crash is inevitable.

"The challenge now is that we don't regress," says Bill Hutton, past president of the Canadian Lacrosse Association. "Whenever we've had a down, what happened was that the sport outgrew its resources. They had lousy coaches and lousy officials and they had infighting." Which produced a bad experience for the athletes involved, and stunted lacrosse's growth, even in the good times.

But there is evidence that after more than a century of bumbling, the lacrosse community has finally learned not to deal with success by courting failure. For the first time, a lacrosse boom coincides with a sturdy infrastructure. The sport has diversified its base to include field and box (hockey rink) versions, women, middle-aged men, and children as young as four. There are solid volunteer organizations, even in areas that aren't traditional lacrosse centres.

Governing bodies have introduced coaching, officiating, and learn-to-play programs and clinics. Lighter, synthetic sticks have made the game more accessible to smaller players. More thought and resources have been directed toward once-abandoned house leagues, the growth point for all sports. Over the years, rules have tightened to make the game less violent.

Significantly, the game's progenitors, the First Nations, have again assumed a long-denied leadership role.

And there is an unprecedented spirit of co-operation among the various elements of the notoriously fractious lacrosse community. Most sports organizations endure some in-fighting. In lacrosse, it is an art form.

"One of the many reasons we hadn't been able to grow was that until 1986 or so, there was a very negative view of the OLA office and staff," says former player Stan Cockerton, who has been executive-director of the Ontario Lacrosse Association since 1982. "When I came in here, I went from being Stan who played a lot of junior and won a world championship, to 'Stan, you're an (expletive)!"

With prosperity, that knee-jerk negativity has morphed into a positive atmosphere. Lacrosse is on a palpable upswing, particularly in southern Ontario, where the game has always thrived in isolated pockets. Now its health is widespread.

Engendered by the so-called Baby Boom echo generation, nurtured by forward-thinking executives, and crystallized by the professional Toronto Rock, lacrosse has not been this popular since the last turn of the century when it was, arguably, the country's premier spectator sport.

There are 29,414 registered lacrosse players in Canada, an increase of 267 per cent since 1988.

A sport which only recently was isolated to southern Ontario and British Columbia's lower mainland has successfully reached into the Maritimes. Quebec has a thriving non-competitive program. And this year, Alberta is expected to challenge for the Minto Cup, breaking Ontario and BC's longtime monopoly on the national junior championship.

The most impressive upturn is in Ontario. There are more than 20,000 players in this province. That might pale beside the 194,000 who play hockey and 300,000 who are registered in soccer but it is a 380 per cent increase since 1989. The Junior A league has stabilized at eleven teams and the Junior B circuit has more than doubled over the past decade, to 19 teams. The elite Major League, once whittled to three franchises, has seven teams, three of which are First Nations-owned.

That macro-growth is mirrored in centres like Burlington, where about 550 players of all ages are registered. Seven years ago there were 196.

"We've done a lot of promotions within Burlington ourselves," says Burlington Minor Lacrosse Association president Kathleen Vennell.

"Now the problem is getting volunteers and coaches. With expansion, it's taken us eight years to get a board with more members doing things."

In Hamilton, the HMLA has wiped out its $45,000 debt owed to the city for floor time, and for 1999 registered about 400 boys and girls, up 100 from the previous year.

But that's still way down from the 750 who were involved in 1995, reflecting another aspect of lacrosse: its legendary in-fighting. In the mid-90s, the association was fraught with Internecine warfare with one group suing another about who could sit on the executive board.

"There was a lot of politics involved so people then look for something else for their kids," says Polawski. "What really is a problem in the sport is that people come in for self-serving purposes and the goals are lost."

In lacrosse, it was ever thus. Turf wars have cost this game dearly.

The most conspicuous, and ugly, example came in the mid-1970s, when a big-city professional circuit folded, sending about 100 of the game's premier players back to Ontario major ranks. But a vindictive OLA ruled that each of its teams could sign only four returning pros, about 20 in all. The rest were forced out of the game, robbing Ontario lacrosse of a generation of top players and leaving a bitter taste with the game's core group.

"They all retired," says one of those ex-pros, Oakville's Bruce Todman, who runs laxtreme.com, one of the sport's pre-eminent web sites. "I didn't even go to a game, not one game, for five years. And the west won six straight Mann Cups," the major level national championship.

"That set lacrosse back 10 years," says Six Nations' Gaylord Powless, another mid-70s pro, and the best player of his generation.

It was not the first time, though, that lacrosse had sent some of its leading artists into exile. Conflict, on and off the field, was part of the game's essential character long before Europeans landed in North America.

Civil war is bred in its bones.

The Algonquins called the game baggataway, the Iroquois tewaraathon. When he saw the Hurons playing the impressive field game in 1638, French missionary Jean de Bribeuf called it la crosse. In some languages, the game's original name means "Little Brother to War."

In one native legend, the air and land animals played lacrosse to determine which was superior. The flying things won. The Abenaki believe that the northern lights are their ancestors playing lacrosse.

The incident which most famously links lacrosse to war came at Fort Michilimackinac (Michigan) in 1763 when 40 Ojibwa and 40 Saux used a lacrosse game as a Trojan Horse distraction, then slaughtered the unsuspecting English garrison.

Although it has a deep-seated violent streak, lacrosse is also among the most graceful and spiritual of games. It may be this spirituality which never allows the last ember to die out.

"When I was a kid in Orillia in the '50s, there was no organized lacrosse in town," says Bill Watters, Toronto Maple Leafs executive and managing partner of the Toronto Rock. "We had no place to play. But we all had sticks and we all had an affinity for it.

"And I don't know why."

Maybe because lacrosse is, as some aboriginals insist, "The Creator's Game"?

Lacrosse is not so much a First Nations game as an Iroquois one, fostered for centuries by the Mohawks of present-day Six Nations, Akwesasne (Cornwall) and Kahnawake (Montreal). Aboriginal people in the southern United States and Canadian prairies, for instance, had no history of it.

Mass lacrosse games promoted not only physical strength but spiritual peace, and were usually scheduled by medicine men. Games could be played to wish for luck in war or the hunt, to restore a sick person's health, to cleanse the spirit or to honour ancestors. Because the stick was made of hickory, it was thought to contain the power and essence of Mother Earth.

Powless's father, Ross, himself a Hall of Famer, recalls playing medicine games in the early 1950s in front of the Onondaga longhouse at Six Nations.

"We played for successful and injury-free seasons," he said.

By the middle of the 19th century, non-natives were playing lacrosse for club teams around Montreal. Often games would be scheduled against native teams that were so good they were obliged to use fewer players.

From there, the history of whites and natives in lacrosse, as in so many other areas of life, became one of colonization and marginalization.

Montreal dentist George Beers laid out the first set of codified rules and on 1 July 1867, the National Lacrosse Association was formed.

On Confederation Day, a Six Nations team beat a Toronto side at the Cricket Club, stimulating enough interest that there were soon thirteen lacrosse clubs in Toronto. On the same day, a team from Kahnawake beat Montreal Lacrosse Club for the first "national title."

But the new rules were taking the game further from its native roots. Lacrosse became a passing, rather than a carrying, game.

Historian Thomas Vennum Jr. says that to Beers, in the context of Euro-American scientific thought, "everything about the Indian game seemed irrational, unscientific, impromptu and lacking in organization."

Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

But the game was being rapidly assimilated into white culture and by 1880 native teams had been banned from the national championships, allegedly for being professionals but probably because they were just too good. Further, Rule IX, section 6, eventually read, "No Indian must play in a match for a white club unless previously agreed upon."

And it was never agreed upon.

Natives played in their own leagues, the remnants of which can still be seen in the form of the Can-Am League, which has a team at Six Nations.

Despite its odious separate-but-equal laws, lacrosse -- field lacrosse was the only version being played -- was in its glory at the turn of the century. By 1911, after Canada had won two Olympic gold medals in lacrosse, the first professional league was formed.

But baseball had already usurped some of the game's popularity and when the First World War killed off many of the best players, lacrosse went into a spiral. The sport retreated to the reserves and the blue-collar centres that kept it alive the next few generations: company towns like Oshawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines and Mimico.

In 1931, the game revived again with the invention of box lacrosse, designed to fill new indoor hockey rinks during the summer months. A four-team professional league was formed, playing out of Maple Leaf Gardens and the Montreal Forum. For many National Hockey League stars like Lionel Conacher, lacrosse was their summer sport. And natives were invited back.

Once again, war annihilated a golden era for lacrosse, and it had to rebuild during the 1950s. The Baby Boom and increased recreation time created a market for the next surge, which was fuelled by Gaylord Powless and the legendary Oshawa Green Gaels. Beginning in 1964, the flashy Gaels won seven straight Minto Cups and Powless was as famous as another Oshawa athlete of the era, Bobby Orr.

The Gaels altered the game, making it more attractive with the fast-break and multi-dimensional offence. In 1967, lacrosse officials, tired of low scores and lengthy periods of "ragging" the ball for defensive purposes, instituted the 30-second shot clock, which triggered even more interest.

"That totally changed the game, for the better," said Powless. "It opened up the game for the speedsters and brought in the smaller guys. It used to take a good-sized man to take a beating day in, day out."

Things were going so well that between 1968 and 1975, two pro leagues, the eight-team National lacrosse Association and its successor, the six-team National Lacrosse League, flirted with success.

But the game was starting to struggle again at the grassroots level, as a strong economy brought more cottages, more summer vacations and more parents objecting to long, hot summers spent in stifling arenas. The arrival of the Blue Jays turned many summer athletes into baseball players.

The banning of the returning NLL pros and lacrosse's traditional infighting also didn't help. By the late 1970s, house leagues were endangered species, entire programs had collapsed in some cities, and again the sport retreated to its traditional hotbeds.

"So much had to do with the people who run the sport in the community," says Tom Peters of the OLA. "If they left the game or retired, it wasn't like hockey where there were 100 people just ready to step in. Sometimes all it took for it to fold in a community was one main organizer to leave."

It looked grim but with relatively forward-thinking management in both the OLA and CLA, the sport began a slow rebound in the mid-80s.

Nowhere was that more evident than at Ohsweken. Six Nations formed its own Junior A team in the late 1980s and by 1992, the Arrows had won the Minto Cup.

"That was history," says Powless. "There'd never been a Minto Cup on a reserve."

Two years later, there was a Mann Cup on the reserve, when the Six Nations Chiefs, a native-owned-and-managed team, won the national major championship with a mix of native and white players. They went on to win two more national titles.

As well as the Chiefs and Arrows, Six Nations is also home to a Junior B team, a Can-Am team and the Ohsweken Wolves, who play their games in their Major Series at Hamilton Mountain Arena.

"I think finally our people have got confident that we can compete with non-native teams and own our own teams," says Cheryl Henhawk, Six Nations director of nations.

"The Chiefs and Arrows are great role models. The young kids all want to play there."

While its originators have reclaimed a big piece of the sport, and while lacrosse has repaired itself at the grassroots level, the Toronto Rock have given every player something to shoot for.

The expansion professional franchise was a failure in its debut season as the Ontario Raiders, based at Hamilton's Copps Coliseum. They didn't work closely enough with local minor lacrosse, angered potential Six Nations supporters, chose a silly generic place name, played on the wrong nights, didn't invest enough in promotion, didn't have local ownership and charged too much for tickets.

That changed when Maple Leafs executive Bill Watters bought the team with high-profile partners like Brendan Shanahan and moved the team to Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto and renamed the club the "Toronto Rock." They invested $150,000 in TV exposure and it paid off: the club averages 11,000 fans per night.

The team has won back-to-back NLL championships since moving from Hamilton for the 1999 season, and has lost at home only once in 16 games over those two seasons (regular season and playoffs combined).

Plus, the Rock has developed a symbiotic relationship with the OLA. Most lacrosse organizers call the pro team the best thing that has ever happened to the game. And the fact that the Rock plays in winter means there's no conflict with the games of young players, which happen in the summer.

So, it appears that for the first time in nearly 100 years, professional and amateur lacrosse are heading in the same direction, and the Creator's Game has a bright future.

"Well," Gaylord Powless says cautiously, "we can only hope."

The above article first appeared in the Hamilton Spectator early in the 2000 season, and has been edited to remove in-season references to the Rock.