This weekend sports in Ottawa will feel different.

Both when the CFL’s Redblacks host the Montreal Alouettes on Friday night - just a few short minutes from where an armed gunman rained chaos on the city Wednesday - and then again when the NHL’s Senators host the New Jersey Devils in suburban Kanata.

It’s not the games themselves that are going to feel different.

It will be the aura around them, the feel in the stands as they begin to fill up, the singing of “O Canada”, which will be sung with a little more belief, conviction and pride.

There are of course the first sporting events since the attacks this week, when the National War Memorial became a crime scene and the Parliament Buildings the subject of terrorist-minded attack.

As Jeff Hunt the president of the Ottawa Redblacks said earlier this week, hosting a game Friday night gives his organization, "the honour, the power and the responsibility" to help lead the healing process.

An assault on such symbolic places, in a city that often feels more like a large village, cuts deep. Virtually everyone in Ottawa would know somebody who was in the parliament buildings, or nearby when the chaos erupted.

Virtually everyone will be in some way affected.

There aren’t a lot of ways to find comfort by sharing that pain, or ways to begin the healing process alongside others similarly affected, which is why sports will play an important role in the return to normalcy for people in Ottawa.

Not because it can allow people to take their minds off of what’s occurred, but because it gives them a chance to band together in a unified voice, to express their determination to remain united in the face of threat.

It’s also a way to remind ourselves that the world is still mostly a safe place; that it’s okay to be among crowds without feeling threatened by the thought about who might be lurking among us with the worst of intentions.

Ask anyone who attending the first week of NFL games after 9/11 about what that felt like.

Or anyone who attended a sporting event in Boston after that city was hit by a terrorist threat at the Marathon.

Some people wondered if the city would ever feel the same, if going to sporting events would feel like it used to, a place to laugh and cheer and lose yourself in the magnificent distraction of it all.

What the Bruins’ run to the Stanley Cup final and the Red Sox road to the World Series title proved was that people were in fact not afraid to gather in public, that standing as one behind your team as a community had a cathartic quality to it.

That’s what the people in Ottawa will experience Friday and Saturday night - strengthened by the opportunity to share with each other their determination to remain strong.

Watch the Alouettes vs. Redblacks live tonight on TSN1, TSN4 and TSN5 starting at 6:30pm et/3:30pm pt.