from Stephen Whyno of the CP at the Globe and Mail,

Canadian fans are hard to come by at the world hockey championship, and some of those wearing paper hats with the red-and-white Maple Leaf are Belarusians who have picked a team to cheer for at the tournament.

Then there’s Chris Sebastian and Kevin Snowden, lifelong friends of Canadian captain Kevin Bieksa from Grimsby, Ont. After deciding last week to come to Minsk, they ran into some trouble along the way.

Sebastian and Snowden left Toronto in the second period of Team Canada’s opening game Friday against France and didn’t arrive until there was a minute left in Saturday’s game against Slovakia. It was a 32-hour journey with stops in five countries because they didn’t have the requisite visa to travel through Moscow.

Snowden pointed at Sebastian and said that he thought for 30 hours his friend was going to kill him because “we were flying all over Europe trying to get here and finally it came to the point where we had to make a decision: Are we going to go to Minsk tonight or not?” he said. “In order to do that we had to fly from Warsaw to Frankfurt, back to Minsk, spend an extra thousand (dollars) Canadian. It cost us a lot, but to get here and actually be here it’s just amazing.”

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