Scott Wilkie, of Winnipeg in hockey-crazy Canada, saw the story and offers ‘‘all the sports enthusiasts in Canberra’’ some sympathy but also hope ‘‘in this dark hour’’.

‘‘I can certainly feel for the hockey fans in Canberra after hearing the latest news,’’ he says.

‘‘We lost our National Hockey League team, the Winnipeg Jets, for 15 years before reacquiring another franchise 2 years ago.

‘‘The impact it had at the time was particularly devastating to the collective psyche of the sports fans of this city. Much like Canberra’s Knights, we were a small-market team trying to exist in a league that simply outgrew the demographics in this marketplace.

''But I have no doubt that the phoenix will once again rise and Canberra Knights will be back in the fold in due course. Unfortunately, my son is in Canberra and was fully expecting to play for the Knights this season.

‘‘Still, he has had the good fortune of missing out on what has turned out to be the most miserable winter in Winnipeg in recent memory, with temperatures frequently approaching the -35 [degree] threshold. So if he chooses to look for the silver lining, one should most certainly start there.’’

We are not so ice-hockey besotted in Canberra as they must be in Winnipeg, and it’s unlikely we are as bruised by the end of the Knights as the Winnipeggers were by the end of the Jets.

But somehow a real, grown-up, broad-shouldered city needs to be able to boast a suite of essential institutions. It needs its own fine symphony orchestra but somehow, also, among other essential sporting and cultural treasures, a national league ice-hockey team.

That one could, in the same week, go to entertainments as diverse as the CSO thrilling us with a Beethoven piano concerto in the elegant Llewellyn Hall and then the Canberra Knights thrilling us with a brutal crunching of the Sydney Ice Dogs in the dilapidated bogan habitat of the frosty arena at Phillip was a great joy. It made the heart rejoice.

‘‘Ah, cities! Ah, diversity and excellence! This is why we could never live in places such as uneventful Wagga Wagga or retire to comatose Broulee! This is why we love this city!’’

With the end of the Knights the city has shrivelled a little and is not quite so diverse and metro-glorious as it was. Speed the day when we, like the patient Winnipeggers, have ice hockey restored to us.

So many Canberrans are tertiary-educated and have lolled (sometimes sound asleep) through so many soporific university lectures that we knew readers’ ears would prick up at the news of Wednesday’s stimulating ‘‘Blow up the lecture?’’ forum at the ANU.

As reported here in Thursday’s learned column, didactic Professor Anant Agarwal argued at the forum that, yes, the traditional university lecture was an outmoded teaching and learning fossil and should be blown sky high.

But another contributor to the forum, Professor Andrew Walker, favoured not so much an end to the lecture as the invention of new sorts of lectures, coming in a range of sexier sizes and shapes.

He was interested, he told us, ‘‘in some options for what the lecture can become’’.

‘‘What about the 10-minute lecture, the 10-minute pre-recorded video lecture? We used them a lot in a course I ran last year. It can be a lot of fun recording them. I recorded one up on Black Mountain and another in the legal graffiti site underpass out under Barry Drive.

''I used the latter to demonstrate points about power and regulation. These lectures are are less focused on content, but much more on providing students with a road map to a broader array of material.

‘‘Then there’s the YouTube guest lecture. You don’t have to go around the corridors knocking on the doors of your colleagues forlornly asking if they can give a guest lecture. For you, Google is your friend. Go to YouTube and you’ll find an enormous array of material.

''I gave a lecture in my course last year on [an aspect of Islam] I wasn’t particularly expert on. I got on to YouTube and I got some wonderful material and it provided a wonderful basis for discussion in tutorials.

‘‘Then, what about the Twitter lecture? What better way to introduce a series of concepts to students than through the bite-sized medium of Twitter, with links to other objects, to readings, to images, to videos? We ran one of our lectures as a week-long Twitter feed, with a particular hashtag that students could follow. [Twitter] is a pretty exciting, pretty shambolic world in which you can embed a lecture and expose students to all sorts of wondrous discussion.

‘‘So I don’t see any death of the lecture, but I see a great flourishing; a great excitement for the lecture as new technology and new thinking liberates both lecturers and students.’’

Surely all of us who, at university, had to endure the standard 50-minute drone, will envy the students of tomorrow who are going to have the sort of learning smorgasbords Professor Walker imagines.