Call off the search -- Sidney Crosby’s gear has been found

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Call off the Great White North search -- Sidney Crosby‘s missing glove and hockey stick have been found.

Hockey Canada announced Wednesday that the stick and one of the gloves Crosby threw to the ice following his gold-medal clinching goal against the U.S. on Feb. 28 was misplaced rather than stolen.

Crosby’s stick was found in Toronto as part of a shipment heading to the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame in St. Petersburg, Russia. The missing glove was found in a bag belonging to defenseman Patrice Bergeron, who sat next to Crosby in their Olympic locker room.

‘With everyone’s co-operation, we were able to locate these items and are pleased to be able to return the stick and glove to its rightful owner,’ Scott Salmond, Hockey Canada’s director of men’s national teams, said in a statement.

A lot of folks inside Hockey Canada believed the gear was misplaced, but that didn’t prevent skeptics from believing the gear was bound to end up on eBay.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Crosby’s gear went missing -- the jersey Crosby wore in 2005 during Canada’s World Junior Championship victory over Russia was stolen. It was eventually found stuffed inside a mailbox outside a post office in Quebec.

-- Austin Knoblauch