Upon further review: glimpses of 2018
It was the year that Blayre Turnbull realized her Olympic hockey dreams.
The year that the NRHS Nighthawks boys’ rugby team finally brought a provincial championship to the school.
A year that Dave MacLennan, seemingly nowhere close to slowing down, won his fifth Bluenose Marathon and 12th Johnny Miles Marathon. Random Sports Thought About 2018:
• An all-around nice day: Aug. 26 was one of those late-summer days that was close to perfect: bright sunshine, warm but not intensely so, and at the pond in Valley Woods where Blayre Turnbull first learned to play hockey on its frozen winter surface, a few dozen gathered as Olympic Park was formally named.
It was to honour not just Turnbull and her silver medal from the 2018 Olympics, but Babe Mason and his Olympic boxing experience from back in ’56. The speeches were brief, the mood was light and the smiles were genuine.
• I still blame the head coach (someone hass to take the blame, right?) for turning gold into silver: leaving younger, faster legs on the bench in the third period and overtime while relying on her obviously worn-down veterans, some of whom looked on the verge of collapse as the Americans swarmed them in OT. But whatever.
• Teetering on the brink of disaster by late November, the Junior A Crushers ended 2018 with a five-game winning streak, which not only kept them in the playoff chase, but gave local fans reason for hope on Thursday nights. The Crushers seem to be getting better by the minute, and other teams in the MHL are starting to notice.
• It wasn’t the biggest or the best sports story of 2018, but my own favourite was probably
a profile on Sadie LeBlanc, the boxer from Pictou who, once she is old enough to fight competitively, will be the creator of much carnage in the ring. She does ‘FunBoxing’ exhibition events at the moment, but will be eligible to compete for real when she turns 11 years old in a few months.
If she sticks with boxing, Sadie LeBlanc will be a champion one day.
Sadie was a fun interview, too; sometimes, a 10-year-old will answer a question with a “yeah” or a “no” or an “I don’t know” but with Sadie, you didn’t have to coax anything out of her, you simply asked a question and she took over from there.
“I like my bruises. For people to be like, ‘oh, what happened?” and I go, ‘I was sparring’,” she said back in May.
“I feel really bad when I give them a good shot, but I mean, boxing is boxing and you gotta do what you gotta do.” And there you go. Non-Sports Thought of the Week:
• The News selected the ongoing saga at Northern Pulp as the top news story of 2018 in Pictou County. On one side, you’ve got the good jobs associated with Northern Pulp, which is not an easy thing to dismiss. We get that.
On the other side, you’ve got environmentalists, fishermen and other folks who are just plain tired of all the pollution belching out of that mill.
Then you add the dynamic of provincial governments – both past and present – who have long bowed down to the mill’s various owners, and politicians who don’t have the intestinal fortitude to take a stand either way (except for former premier and Northern Pulp board of director John Hamm: I think it’s clear where his loyalties lie).
This story isn’t going away anytime soon.