“It’s deja-vu all over again.” –
Yogi Berra
We’ve been here before, I think.
And I’m not talking about waiting excitedly
for a new, probably ill-advised Bill & Ted movie.
I’m talking about watching an Ottawa
Senators team drastically trying to switch their identity from out of control
train-wreck to lovable losers to, eventually… Stanley Cup contender.
As this season of modest expectations kicks
off, the Senators are likely entering their “lovable losers” stage,
which is much preferable to the last two seasons where they involuntarily
entered the American mainstream pop culture.
The Simpson’s show landed a joke so cutting
about the franchise that it made even Leafs and Habs fans feel sorry for the
Senators, at least for a day or two. The last time people were laughing so much
at this franchise was back in 1993 when ESPN gleefully showed a clip of Sens
winger Andrew McBain leaving the Chicago Stadium ice and going ass over teakettle
down the stairs to the dressing room.
When McBain lost his footing that night,
the Senators record was 9 wins, 56 losses and 4 ties. They wound up losing 14
more times that season, a record that is still hard to understand right now.
For their efforts, they were awarded the luxury of drafting Alexandre Daigle,
who would go on to fall down many more flights of stairs than McBain ever did,
metaphorically speaking.
You’ve heard most of the stories before…
holdouts, robberies, bomb threats, bankruptcies, divorce, road rage, trade
demands, mascot injuries, fires, line dancing and bad karaoke.
Sens fans have lived through every
imaginable horror in their short existence, but only once have they lived
through what happened in April 1997.
That’s the month when the jokes stopped. A
perennial last-place team full of castaway vets and promising draft picks
finally came together and won a meaningful game that clearly altered the course
of the franchise.
Let’s go back there for just a moment. Last
game of the season. Win and you’re in the playoffs for the first time in team
history. The only thing in the way is the Buffalo Sabres, the world’s best
goalie in Dominik Hasek and the Senators own history which seemed to preclude
anything good happening to nice people.
Unsurprisingly, nobody could score. The
Senators are tighter than they’ve looked in weeks, after huge victories against
Detroit and Montreal that put them in this position to win in the first place. This
was all a new feeling for a lot of us watching at home. Local fans weren’t used
to having anything important on the line, other than a $2 Pro-Line ticket.
Sudden alcoholism ran rampant across the
city. Bathroom cabinets were raided for available pills. Dogs ran around
chasing their tails for hours, feeling the electric stress of their masters.
In the last 5 minutes of the 3rd
period, Alexei Yashin deked out Sabres defenseman Gary Galley, and curled back
to the blueline to send a saucer pass to a pinching Steve Duchesne. The ensuing
shot was weird to watch, like Duchesne was reaching for a lost tennis ball
under the couch with a broom handle. He just sort of flung it out of there and
it skipped by Hasek for the eventual clincher.
People snapped. Mentally and physically.
Play-by-play man Dave Schreiber shredded
his vocal cords screaming “Yashin across to Duchesne… he…. DU DU DU DU
DUCHESNE!”
Sworn enemies embraced on the sodden floors
of bars like The Prescott and The Dominion Tavern. Grown men and women wept
openly in front of their frightened children. Yashin, not known to smile often,
almost swallowed Duchesne’s head in the ensuing celebration.
I watched it in a bar across the country in
Vancouver. Drunk old men stared at me as I let out a primal welp that I tried
to conceal as best as possible so as not to look like a complete madman. I ran
to a payphone to call my family in Ottawa and when the other end picked up all
I heard was screaming.
My little brother jumped so high off the
couch that he pulled a piston in his back and it hasn’t been right to this day.
You know it’s an important game when you walk away with a permanent
life-altering injury, player and fan-alike.
You might ask what’s the point of the trip
down memory lane? Maybe there’s a chance the people who weren’t around in ‘97
will get lucky a few years from now to witness a team, derided and written-off,
to catch a little taste of glory when they weren’t supposed to.
That Senators team went on to lose a 7-game
first round series to those very Sabres a couple of weeks later, but from that
point on, the team quickly morphed into a contender that suffered a series of
devastating playoff losses when expectations were high.
It’s a different feeling to be a
front-runner and lose than it is to be an underdog and prove the critics wrong
(and still eventually lose). It’s a necessary step on the way to becoming a
contender, and the window is brief, but it proves to be some of the most
rewarding moments for both die-hard and casual fans.
When you look at the 2019 Ottawa Senators, you
might see a last-place team full of kids and veterans on their last tours of
the NHL. I see the seeds of a team that’s heading down the same path those
early Senators did on their way to that defining ’97 moment.
When Daniel Alfredsson came to this city in
1995, people were openly wondering if the franchise was on its way out of town
after just two years in the league. Rumours swirled of coach Dave “Sparky”
Allison holding a séance in the Civic Centre to rid the team of bad mojo. If he
ever did, it certainly didn’t work while he was still around.
Brady Tkachuk arrived with the team in
similar dire circumstances, with star players being dealt and fans sitting on
their wallets on the way to a last place finish. Luckily for Alfredsson,
management stocked the team with vital draft picks like Marian Hossa, Martin
Havlat and timely trades for Wade Redden and Zdeno Chara.
Tkachuk must look around the room and see
the likes of Thomas Chabot, Erik Brannstrom, Drake Batherson and trade
acquisitions like Anthony Duclair and Nikita Zaitsev and wonder if the worst is
finally over. There’s something eerily similar here to what led to that near
decade of Stanley Cup contention starting in the late 90’s.
No one’s saying this year’s edition is
going to get a chance to clinch a playoff spot on the last day of the season.
They might be trying to clinch the 1st overall draft pick instead
where a phenom out of the Quebec League is predicted to be the next consensus
franchise player. This time his name is not Alexandre Daigle, but Alexis
Lafrenière. And yes, that is a scary coincidence.
All I know is I’m stocking a strong supply
of alcohol, pills and at least a pair of Amazon’s most recommended back braces,
just in case this thing turns around quicker than we expected.
“Those who do not learn from history are
doomed to repeat it.” – Someone smart probably.
