I'm reminded of a friend of my late father, a colleague of his in the construction trades who is my age. He lives in a working class neighborhood south of Detroit and raised a large family of mostly boys, obsessed hockey fans all.

For close to 20 years while his boys were growing up, Martin helped organize and host a youth hockey club exchange with a team near St Petersburg.

Martin and other parents of the US team would house dozens of young Russian hockey players for a two or three week tournament, and then a bunch of the American boys would fly to Russia and do it all in reverse. Very close family relationships developed.

I never met a person who thought badly of this, despite lingering Cold War anti-Russian-state sentiment and so forth, particularly prominent among working-class Republicans like Martin and his friends.