I’ve just returned from a whirlwind trip to Milan for the Olympics with my closest childhood friends from Vancouver. We saw eight hockey games in four days, including watching Team Canada convincingly beat Czechia and Switzerland. Every time we got off the Milan subway near the arena, we were greeted by Jehovah’s Witnesses encouraging passersby to take reading material (in both Italian and English). They looked strikingly similar to the familiar groups on Canadian streets.This strange triumvirate of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Milan, and hockey is what combined to lead to what of the most important cases in Canadian constitutional history. In 1959, the Supreme Court of Canada ordered the premier of Quebec, the powerful Maurice Duplessis, to pay damages to Montreal restauranteur Frank Roncarelli for cancelling his liquor licence without any valid legal justification. Duplessis had ordered the director of the Quebec Liquor Authority to annul Roncarelli’s liquor licence because the premier was irate that Roncarelli was providing money for bail for Jehovah’s Witnesses who were arrested for handing out pamphlets like the ones in Milan or on Canadian streetcorners. This case – Roncarelli v. Duplessis – is seen as a foundational decision on the rule of law in Canada. It stands for the twin principles that all governmental authority must be based on law and that no one is above the law, not even the most powerful government leader. These principles are being challenged today even more than in Roncarelli’s day.Roncarelli was born in Italy and immigrated to Montreal as a young child with his family. He was raised Catholic and played hockey and other sports, including fencing. He studied engineering at McGill and then spent a decade in Milan working as an engineer, marrying a Milanese woman and starting a family. He played hockey for HC Milan and for the Italian national team. At the time, Italy was led by the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. At some point, Roncarelli abandoned his Catholic faith and became a Jehovah’s Witnesses. He returned to Montreal in the mid-1930s with his family and opened the restaurant that would become the subject of the case that bore his name.Roncarelli’s story shows that our Constitution is so much more than dry, technical decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada. It contains the stories of Canadians who challenged governmental authority or, in some cases, were simply caught up in a series of events that ended up at the Supreme Court of Canada. Our constitutional history is full of heroes, villains and crusaders: people like Frank Roncarelli who ended up scoring a winning goal for rights and freedoms in Canada.