ESKIMOS’ SUCCESS REFRESHING

What is it about the Grey Cup, exactly?

It’s just a game, after all, and not by any means the highlight of a Canadian sports calendar so dominated by hockey. If you aren’t paying attention, you might even miss the Canadian Football League’s championship game — something only someone living under a rock could do with the Stanley Cup playoffs.

And yet if you did miss it, well, you’d miss it — even if you aren’t really a fan. For 103 years, the Grey Cup — like American Thanksgiving — has given us permission to begin the Christmas season. More profoundly, it reminds us that Canadian sport didn’t always care how we measured up to the Americans, and whether our southern neighbours noticed if we did.

Of course, this year there isn’t much chance Edmontonians will overlook the game. As the Oilers blunder through another season of unfulfilled hype, the Eskimos are heading to the Grey Cup after decisively thrashing the Calgary Stampeders in a game that should shame the NHL into permanently surrendering its conceit about The Battle of Alberta.

What a glorious tonic for a difficult economic time; what a pleasant symbol of our gradual, unassuming emergence on the national and even international scene as a noted Canadian and Albertan city.

And what a classic Canadian formula: Edmonton will play Ottawa in Winnipeg, as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver peer wistfully through the window, frozen out of the action while fans from across the country willingly freeze their posteriors at Investors Group Field.

With no disrespect to the local NHL franchise — which will likely always command pride of place in local hearts — the 2015 Eskimos attract us because they are anti-Oilers in many ways. They have a dynamic, productive offence that almost always entertains, with multiple passing weapons so effective they don’t need much of a methodical ground game.

Even more shockingly, the Eskimos play effective, generally consistent defence. (Older Oilers fans remember what that is.)

But most of all, our CFL football team is a nimble, carefully repaired destroyer next to the Oilers’ great, lumbering, slow-turning battleship of an enterprise. The crew come ashore like ordinary folks making ordinary money; they have quietly been “of the community” in an ordinary-Joe, good neighbourly way celebrity millionaire Oilers can never quite be.

Indeed, like most of us ordinary mortals, Eskimos players are not — and don’t need to be — at the very pinnacle of the talent pyramid. Like most of us, they have discovered life can be full of triumphant, fulfilling competition despite the imperfections that kept them from their dream of a spot in America’s NFL.

Think about it: The Eskimos are back in the Grey Cup after only a decade — a period of time during which Oilers fans only stay awake in the third period so they can discuss the team’s next top draft pick. (Heck, the Ottawa Redblacks have only been in the league two years, notwithstanding a name that sounds like the work of a Soviet bureaucrat.)

Will the Eskimos win? Well, that’s our bet. Editor Margo Goodhand and Ottawa counterpart Andrew Potter have vowed that if their team loses, they’ll write and publish a 400-word editorial singing the praises of the winning city.

Thanks to organizations like the Eskimos, which exemplify our hard-working, down-toearth approach to life, Potter’s job Monday morning will be easy.

But probably not much fun.

The 2015 Eskimos attract us because they are anti-Oilers in many ways.