You'd think that by now all of the great choral works of the creator of the Messiah would have received a thorough warbling everywhere in Christendom. But no! Until now Australian ears have never had the chance to prick up at the sound of his Alexander Balus, about to be warbled by the Canberra Choral Society and soloists.

We know that Handel could have set even the Hansards of the ACT Legislative Assemblyor the written submissions of the Yarralumla Residents' Association to music for soloists and chorus and it would have come out sounding glorious. And so it was relatively easy for him to make something glorious, in Alexander, with a setting of some of the Bible's action-packed (battle! politics! ruffians kidnapping Cleopatra! treachery! rage! revenge!) First Book of the Maccabees.

While we're discussing the Bible, we digress for a moment. We do it to report that Christian ice-hockey fans (yes, I know that sounds like an oxymoron, for ice hockey has strong pagan associations) found a theologically wobbly claim made in the official program given out at last weekend's dramatic Australian Ice Hockey Finals at Melbourne's Icehouse.

Canberrans will remember how with the commencement of this year's National Ice Hockey League season only a few weeks away the impecunious Canberra Knights withered away. Horror! Over a few weeks of urgent moving and shaking, money-raising and player-recruiting our new team, the CBR Brave, was imagined and then arose. It was a great Canberra story made even greater (a double-decker fairytale) when the Finn-enriched team got to last weekend's finals.

Marvelling, the program sang to its Christian and pagan readers that you had to admire "the passion, ingenuity and chutzpah of a team which put together an entire club from scratch in [fewer] days than it took God to create the earth".

But of course God, rolling His big sleeves up, created the Earth and everything in it, in just six days. Who knows that extras He might have added if only He'd had as much time, a feverish few weeks, as was taken to create the CBR Brave.

It was poignant to be among fellow CBR Brave pagans from Canberra in the pulsating Icehouse. But after our team's dispiriting loss we moped off our separate ways (each to his own tram, with this columnist weeping on a number 86) into the Melbourne night, I was reminded of the (literally) crying need there is for some form of ritual for disappointed sports fans to engage in together, as a tribe, a grieving tribe. All of you, dear readers, who have a history of loyal team fandom, know how much a loss can hurt. There is no pain quite like it. To just drift away after a lost match to go and drink oneself to oblivion among strangers in a strange bar leaves everything unresolved gives no closure.

What if, instead, on last weekend's Black Saturday, we had all been able (using the ritual-rich Vikings as our role models) we had been able to gather together, tribal in our CBR Brave merchandise, around a giant bonfire on which we burned appropriate effigies; to embrace, to dance, to grieve together, to sing and chant appropriate pagan ice-hockey hymns? After that, feeling better, we could have ebbed away into the night with a fulfilled feeling.

I will get to work at once on a pagan sports-grief hymn (set to a popular melody, perhaps a Slim Dusty ditty that all will know), easily adaptable for all grieving fans of teams of any sports.

But back to the restless Maccabees and to CCS' artistic creative director Tobias Cole's courageous choice of Alexander Balus, in which he, of course a revered counter-tenor will trill the role of King Alexander. For surely it is courageous of you, we put it to him, to stage an unfamiliar work with no proven ability to plonk bums on seats at the Playhouse? But Cole (who even sang me a little of an Alexander chorus over the phone!) says that while it was "very brave of us" to perform Handel's Saul and Theodora in Canberra in recent times, the filling of the 600-seat Playhouse for Theodora (well done, adventure-embracing Canberrans!) has created "a momentum" that he hopes and believes bodes well for Alexander.

"And we're selling Handel's name because that says to people that they're bound to get something of quality. So were saying 'trust us that it will be good'."

He's very, very excited that this will be the first-ever Australian performance. Alexander Balus was staged only four times in Handel's lifetime and, what's more, the Canberra performance is almost certainly the world's first performance to feature an audience "singalong". For, yes, after a little pre-concert coaching, we all get to stand and sing stirring and rejoicing things at the glittering wedding of Alexander (Cole) and of the lovely and unsuspecting Cleopatra (Jacqueline Porter), who is being used by her machiavellian swine of a father, King Ptolemy, as a political plaything.

Handel's Alexander Balus is at 7.30pm on Saturday September 20 at the Canberra Playhouse. Tickets by Canberra Ticketing.