Closure

So you may have noticed that I’ve yet to comment on the Memorial Cup, a week after the Hitmen’s ouster at the hands of the hated Brandon Wheat Kings. This is very much intentional. If you stalk me on the Internet, you may have caught wind of some rather bitter sentiments regarding the way the Hitmen went out, and I wanted some distance to see if I still felt the same way before saying anything long-form. The answer? Kinda, but not entirely.

So first the “kinda” part. It continues to feel to me tremendously unfair that we dispatched the Wheaties rather handily in the playoffs, winning four straight after dropping the first game, then beat them again quite handily in the round robin (to the tune of 5-1, all goals in the first), and still had to beat them again in order to advance. I knew going into Friday’s game that it was going to be a squeaker, and I wasn’t going to be surprised at all if the Hitmen lost. Why? Because they’d just punted the Wheaties pretty hard, they were gonna come back pissed, and I wasn’t convinced the Hitmen were going to be able to get up for yet another battle against a repeatedly vanquished foe. Sure enough, three minutes and change into overtime, there they were, looking on in disbelief as the host team earned a free pass for the right to get skullfucked by the once and future kings (again). It was like a scene in a zombie movie, where one of the secondary heroes thinks he’s killed the zombie, but it pops back up again, so he puts a decisive round into its head, starts to walk away in that action-movie sort of way…then gets ripped to shreds by that same fucking zombie. Except not funny, because my team was the guy who got torn to hell.

I went over it in my head a hundred times. Why the hell should Brandon get a free pass? It’s not like they lost a hard-fought WHL Final or anything: they got schooled in the semis, for crying out loud! They’d lost to Calgary and Windsor, the consensus favourites by a mile, by a combined 14-4 in the round-robin. They had no business being there at all, and it showed in the final score of the final game (9-1 Windsor). Shouldn’t there be some way to remove the Wheaties from the process altogether? I dunno, make the Final a best-of-three between the top two teams. You still get your minimum-two-but-maybe-three games for gate receipts and TV ratings, and it seems like a much fairer gauge of who the best team in all the land truly is. Or maybe the hosts shouldn’t get a free pass if they don’t make their respective League Final. Something. Anything’s got to be better than this travesty of a result.

Then I stopped and reflected on the tournament as a whole, and came to a realization: the Hitmen simply didn’t play well enough. They got down 0-3 in each of their first two games, mounting a comeback against Moncton and losing 6-2 to Windsor. They became completely passive in their final round-robin game against Brandon after the first, then simply had no answer for Brandon’s tenacity in the semis. (These two things may or may not be related, depending on how you view momentum in a game.) I wasn’t scared of facing Windsor, as such: I maintain that we could’ve beat them, and if nothing else kept the score close. But I do wonder if we really deserved to win, regardless. Having two or three good periods in a tournament we should have dominated is no way to earn the right to play for the prize. Jones wasn’t good enough, the defence wasn’t good enough, the discipline wasn’t good enough, and outside the Jimmy Bubnick-Tyler Shattock-Kris Foucault line, the scorers weren’t good enough. Sure, we were missing Brandon Kozun, but that’s not an excuse: we were still three lines deep in offensive talent. They weren’t aggressively bad, or anything, they just weren’t at their best for most of the tournament, and it showed.

Still, even if we biffed our second consecutive chance to be crowned kings of junior hockey — and possibly the last for several years, given the amount of turnover likely to occur this summer — there’s a ton to be proud of. Two World Junior representatives, both of whom took home awards for their work at their respective positions: Kozun as the nation’s top scorer, Martin Jones as the West’s top goalie and MVP of the conference and league finals (Edit: and top goalie of the Memorial Cup). First overall in the League, for the second year in a row. The first 1-3 comeback in five years (since we ourselves were turfed by none other than those fucking Wheat Kings). Pasting the League’s best offensive team and the presumptive favourites by winning the goalie battle in spectacular fashion. Winning our first WHL title since the days of Moran, Brendl, and Fomitchev. The final result may not have been what was desired, but there’s a hell of a lot to be proud of here, and as the bitterness and pain fade, there are a lot of fond memories to look back on, and when we raise four more banners to the rafters of the Saddledome in late September, those will be the things that we as fans should focus on, not the resentment and disappointment of a single loss, off a single goal.

For the last time, congratulations to the 2009-10 Calgary Hitmen, and thanks for the memories.

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