SEDINS GONE, BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN
Following a weekend that, for different reasons, we’ll always remember, here are the Monday morning musings and meditations on the world of sports.
The curtain has drawn close on the weeklong celebration of all things Sedin and this city, this province, stands in awe at what they’ve witnessed.
It’s all a bit of a blur right now. Monday’s announcement. A magnificent game on Tuesday. An even better one on Thursday. Writing, so much writing. Then a worthy finale on Saturday in Edmonton that ended with Henrik and Daniel hugging their kids before they presented the game puck to Derek Dorsett. I mean, you couldn’t have scripted it any better. But the truest, most powerful moments from the six days of Sedins were all completely unscripted and that was their real beauty. They were born of these two singular players and everything they are. If you could compress their 18-year careers into six days, this is what it would have looked like and it was something to behold.
I’ve had the great fortune to cover some transcendent sporting events: Mike Weir winning at Augusta, Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl win, Usain Bolt running in Beijing, Olympics, Super Bowls, Stanley Cup finals. But for everything this was, it made the deepest and most lasting impression.
They were extraordinary players, but their triumph lay in the ordinary virtues they represent: the unrelenting work ethic, the selflessness, the common decency. They leave now, but they will always be with us.
This is their legacy. This is who they are and who we will remember.
One of the real joys of Sedinstock was revisiting their careers and the many moments, great and small, they leave behind.
Ace researcher Carolyn Soltau helped relive those moments by delivering a collection of random columns from over the years. Here are a couple that stood out:
— The presumption has always been the Sedins’ breakthrough came in 2005-06, the first season after the lockout. But they foreshadowed what was to come in the second half of 2003-04 when Daniel went on a hot streak highlighted by a four-goal game against Detroit in late February.
“I know them pretty good and, to me, they’re the same guys they were a month ago and they’ll be the same guys after tonight’s game,” Mattias Ohlund said. “I think Daniel is almost embarrassed by all this attention.”
— In 2010, Henrik won the Hart, beating out Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby: “It’s like I don’t belong there. There’s all these great players and then there’s me.”
— One of the most underreported achievements in their career was winning the gold medal with Sweden at the 2006 Olympics in Torino.
That was four years after a stacked Swedish team fell to Belarus in the quarter-finals, creating suffocating pressure for the 2006 team.
“You could feel it in the lockerroom,” Henrik said before the Swedes’ semifinal win over the Czech Republic and before they beat Finland for the gold. “If we lost that one, we couldn’t fly home this summer.
“I don’t think the other teams saw us a gold-medal threat. But, back home we’re supposed to win every tournament.”
— Here was Markus Naslund’s take from the 1999-2000 season on the pressure that was building on the Sedins, who were playing their last season in Sweden.
“I don’t know if you can ever adequately prepare for (the rigours of the NHL) It’s a big transition. You’re going to be homesick. The hockey is so different.
“It took me until the end of the first year to really get settled and know the game. And it took me five years to play at the level I thought I should be at. They’re already comparing these kids to Peter Forsberg and Mats Sundin. Those are two of the five best players who’ve ever come from Sweden. That’s not fair. You’ve got to give them time.”
Patrick Reed didn’t score any style points in capturing the Masters, but the 27-year-old Texan showed some bottle on Sunday, right down to the last four-footer on the 18th green. He was being chased by some of the game’s greatest players on the most demanding of stages and he didn’t have his best stuff. But in every crucial moment, and it seemed like there were half a dozen on the back nine, he stepped up.
Reed joins a group of about 15 elite players capable of winning any tournament in the world. Nine different players have now won the last nine majors and eight of those nine were firsttimers. Still say that makes things more interesting than when it was Tiger against the world.
Finally, in a country that is separated by so many geographical, historical and cultural barriers, hockey is one of the few things that gives Canadians a common sense of purpose, a touchstone.
We see that in good times. But we see it more profoundly in bad times and there’s never been a worse time than this weekend. Those were our sons we lost on the highway in Saskatchewan. Their families are our families and nothing written here will ease the sense of loss.
So we’ll just say this: Humboldt is not alone. Those kids are not alone. Thirty-six million Canadians are tied somehow, someway to the game and, today, we all share the grief.
Most of us have been on that bus. Most of us know what it is to ride those roads in the dead of winter. It might look cold and lonely from the outside but, inside that bus, there is magic. There are kids chasing a dream, teammates, friends for life. That’s how we should think of the Humboldt Broncos; young men, together, sharing the thing that made them most happy, their moment frozen in time.
Right now it might not feel like much.
To them it was everything.