Throughout the course of last Monday (March 17), I had an inner dilemma on my hands for what I would be doing the following evening.
Do I stay in my apartment in Airdrie and watch Canada’s Rachel Homan destroy some Scottish team that doesn’t feature Olympic bronze-medal winner Eve Muirhead at the Women’s World Curling Championships?
Or do I make the hour trip up the highway to Red Deer to watch the fifth tiebreaker game in the history of the Western Hockey League?
Well, after discovering that there were still an abundance of tickets available, I elected to make the trek up the highway on Tuesday night (March 18) to see the Red Deer Rebels take on the Prince Albert Raiders in a winner-take-all affair.
For those of you who aren’t massive junior hockey fans like myself, both the Rebels and the Raiders were tied at the end of the regular season for the eighth and final playoff spot in the WHL’s Western Conference.
In order to break a tie, both teams had to play each other to determine which team would earn the right to play the Edmonton Oil Kings in the first round, while the other team would see its season come to an end.
Since this kind of thing never happened when I was living in Ontario and watching the OHL (Ontario Hockey League) on a regular basis, I decided to head up to Red Deer because the chances of this happening close to me ever again are quite slim.
As I was making the drive to the ENMAX Centrium, I was running through every single scenario in my head as to what would happen, but the biggest question I kept asking myself was ‘What if this game ends up sucking?’
In the four previous times that a tiebreaker game had happened in the WHL, the game was decided by only one goal every single time.
So, I expected that the odds were not going to be in my favour as I entered the arena, and there would be a blowout.
However, I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong over the first two periods, as both teams went back-and-forth and traded scoring chances.
Then, one of the strangest things I have ever seen at a live sporting event happened during the third period.
After Prince Albert scored two goals early in the frame to take a 4-3 lead, if the Rebels were unable to generate a single thing offensively, which seemed bizarre given what was up for grabs.
I remember saying to myself with about five minutes remaining, ‘If Red Deer actually ties this game up, I’m going to be stunned.’
The way things turned out, that scenario didn’t happen.
Prince Albert basically shut down anything Red Deer had, and eventually scored an empty-netter to take a 5-3 win. As I made my way out of the parking lot, and watched two trucks blast into one another as they tried to leave the arena at high speed, I was pretty satisfied with what I had witnessed. Sure it wasn’t an overtime thriller, but the tiebreaker contest hadn’t let me down in the least.
