THE OILERS LOOK TO GIVE US ANOTHER CUP, BUT THEY ALSO GIVE US HOPE
April is the cruelest month.
Or so T.S. Eliot tells us in The Wasteland.
Edmontonians know it all too well.
For Edmonton, a Stanley Cup wasteland lo these many years, recent Aprils have been cruel indeed.
Edmonton has not won a Stanley Cup since 1990 — the year Germany was reunified and Nelson Mandela was freed and Don Getty was premier.
Edmonton hasn’t even made the playoffs since 2006.
That’s meant 11 years of cruel, cruel Aprils, of fans in grief, of fans in resignation, of fans reduced to hoping the Oilers would be the league’s biggest losers, thus bettering their chances of landing a star draft pick — the kind of player who would be our municipal redeemer, our franchise saviour.
And so. Here we are, a few days before Easter, and the boy wonder some call McJesus, the one who racked up 100 points in season play, the one who won the Art Ross Trophy, is offering his fans and followers the promise of hope, the resurrection of our Stanley Cup dreams.
But perhaps it’s more accurate — and marginally less blasphemous — to see Connor McDavid, during this Passover week, as the young Joshua who’s going to lead faithful Oilers fans out of the wilderness, where they’ve been wandering for so long, and take them to the Promised Land. Or at least, to the land of playoff hockey promise.
Whatever archetypal template you invoke, there’s a heavy weight on the shoulders of the Oilers’ wunderkind captain. McDavid carries the hopes of the city — as Edmontonians who normally pay no attention to hockey get swept up, mixing memory and desire, the dull roots of fandom watered with spring rain.
A Stanley Cup run is about more than tribal loyalty or team spirit. The team’s fate is too inextricably intertwined with the soul of the city.
It goes back to the old WHA days, when Edmonton wasn’t deemed good enough or big enough for an NHL franchise. Back then, landing a professional hockey team was a way for upstart Edmonton to cock a snook at Toronto and Montreal, a way to tell central Canada that the West wanted in — even if it had to push in through the back door.
The ascendance of Wayne Gretzky was part of our modern origin myth. We were no longer an unreal city. The success of the Oilers proved Edmonton had arrived as a player on the national stage.
It’s easy to forget, in our nostalgia, that the 1980s were dark times here. In 1984, the year the Oilers won their first Stanley Cup, the unemployment rate in Alberta was 12.4 per cent. In 1987, the year the Oilers snagged their third championship, unemployment in Edmonton was 11.1 per cent. The team gave us solace when it was badly need.
During the 2006 playoff season, Edmonton was in manic boom mode: oil prices were rising, the unemployment rate was 3.6 per cent and employers were desperate to find workers even as newcomers poured into the city. Pumped-up fan behaviour that year mirrored — for better or worse — the manic spirit of the moment.
And now, after a too-long drought, playoff hockey is back — played, for the first time, in a new arena, in an insurgent, resurgent downtown. Edmonton, a bit battered after the last year of economic challenge, feels more confident now, our venerable inferiority complex almost vanquished.
After a long winter of watching hockey in the privacy of basements and living rooms, the fans (and the bandwagon-jumping insta-fans) will flood into bars and restaurants all across the city, coming together to cheer, to celebrate and perhaps, in the end, to commiserate, too.
No one knows how this story ends. No one knows if the Oilers will go out in the first round, in four straight games, shattering hearts across the city. Or if they’ll get tantalizingly close to the finals. Or even — do we dare think it? — if they’ll bring the grail home.
Whatever the outcome, we celebrate this spring not just McDavid, but a team that’s suddenly crystallized around him: a roll-call of the sort that even a hockey know-nothing like me can actually chant: Draisaitl and Maroon and Talbot and Lucic and Nugent-Hopkins and Eberle and Klefbom and Nurse.
What we celebrate isn’t just hockey. It’s hope.
Hurry up, please. It’s time.