Here we go: Definition Game No. 1
There are 10 of them — the Tim Hortons Field Generation — who have been here ever since you had to wear a hard hat to visit the locker-room.
Eight of those 10 played for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats as far back as the 2013 Guelph storms; and went to a couple of Grey Cup games together — to play in them, in case you’d forgotten.
One of those 10, centre Mike Filer also got to experience rickety, but intimate Ivor Wynne Stadium, Hamilton’s ancient town square.
Now they head to Ottawa with three dozen newer teammates, hoping to take the first necessary step to land first place in the CFL East, and go to two games above .500 for the first time since Nov. 7, 2015. And there, astride that road, stand the Redblacks, winners of five of the past seven games between these two emerging rivals, needing essentially only to avoid being swept in the backto-back series, which begins in the Capital Friday, to nail down first place.
Players, coaches and team execs won’t ever view it this way, but fans and other CFL observers always will: This is the first of what could be as many of five autumn Definition Games for quarterback Jeremiah Masoli and the 2018 Ticats, particularly those who’ve been here since Tim Hortons Field was just construction waiting to be delayed.
After Friday, it’s the following Saturday against Ottawa in Hamilton, then a probably-meaningless season-ender against Montreal, followed by as many as three post-season games.
This is Hamilton’s first real Big One since the last-minute 2016 Eastern semifinal loss to Edmonton. And to outsiders it serves as a mixture of barometer, thermometer and polygraph. Who are these guys and what can they really do under pressure, heat and truth serum?
Filer, Masoli, receivers Brandon Banks and Luke Tasker, linebacker Simoni Lawrence, defensive back Courtney Stephen, long-snapper Aaron Crawford and offensive lineman Landon Rice, were all with the Ticats when they played ‘home’ games at the University of Guelph.
And most of them suited up for both the 2013 and ’14 Grey Cups.
Safety Mike Daly and defensive tackle Ted Laurent joined them for 2014’s inaugural season in the new digs. Others have come and gone or, like Delvin Breaux, come and gone and come again. But those are the 10 who’ve been here continuously over the half-decade since Tim Hortons began to mean more than a coffee break.
In a short-term world that passes for a kind of permanence, this is their six-week opportunity to etch that permanence into the city’s collective memory.
“There’s a handful of us who have been here since 2013 and then there were some key guys who came in in ’14 and ’15,” says Tasker. “This is all that I’ve known in the pros, so it seems to me like the turnover is high; but it may be unusual these days, because historically the turnover can be a lot higher than that.”
The year Guelph became a bi-weekly Hamilton suburb, the Redblacks didn’t even exist yet. But by 2015 they had swept the Ticats in the final two season games to secure first place and the opening-week playoff bye.
We all know what happened in the second week: Hank Burris completed that last-minute 93-yard touchdown pass to Greg Ellingson — yes, sigh, both Ticats the previous season — on, sigh again, 2nd and 25, keeping Hamilton from a third straight Grey Cup appearance
“It’s not a Toronto-and-us rivalry,” Laurent says. “But it’s starting to get there a bit. We lost to them in that Eastern final, we played them to see who’d get first place and last year, if we had beat them (in the first of a back-to-back) we still had a chance to make the playoffs. The past three years, every time we played Ottawa a lot of those games were meaningful, and this year it’s the same thing.
“The group of guys that have been here since the Grey Cup in 2014 feel like we want to get back to there, we feel like we have the talent and the coaching staff to do it, so anything else would be really disappointing.”
Not only to them and their fans, but to the folks at CFL.ca who, much too exuberantly, have installed the Ticats at No. 1 in their power rankings this week. 3Down Nation’s No. 3 slot is more realistic. The Ticats still have to prove they belong even there, and Friday night is their biggest opportunity yet to do so.