1 week Ago By Paul Friesen
VANCOUVER – It remains one of the great mysteries of sport, even for someone who’s traversed the valleys and reached the peaks that Mike O’Shea has. Why does the burden of a championship-game defeat stay with you so much longer and feel so much more powerful than the thrill of a championship victory? “It shouldn’t be this way,” the head coach of the Blue Bombers was saying on the eve of the 111th Grey Cup. “I don’t know that there’s many people in sport, no matter what the sport, that have figured it out.
If they have, they can call me and let me know how to figure it out, how to solve it myself. “But yeah, the magnitude of a loss seems to trump the magnitude of the joy of wins.” In his first six Grey Cup appearances, O’Shea had no clue about the former.
He won them all: three as a player, one as an assistant coach in Toronto, two in charge of the Bombers. Then came a crushing, one-point defeat at the hands of Toronto in Grey Cup No. 109, followed by a similar, fourth-quarter, four-point flop against Montreal last year.
It’s enough to shred a man. Yet the Bombers have picked up all those shards of their former selves and somehow managed to put them back together, creating not the same team, but one that still found a way to get back here and risk its self-esteem all over again. Sunday they’ll take on the Argos again, a fifth trip to the mountaintop to either plant a flag with a big, blue ‘W’ on it, or plunge down the other side into the abyss.
The quarterback on each of these treks wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s just a blessing to be around guys that care that much, not just about winning but doing things the right way,” Zach Collaros said. “And the winning comes with doing things the right way.
It doesn’t get old. Each one’s different, each one’s special. You start off your off-season with one thing in mind, that’s playing this game.
” That the Bombers would even be here would have boggled the mind four games into the season. Or eight games into the season. Or even three weekends ago, when they appeared destined for defeat in their final regular-season game, which would have left them twin playoff peaks to scale, only to experience the miracle at the foot of Mount Royal.
Divine intervention, some called it. Getting this far only to lose again might call for an intervention of another kind. “We can’t keep coming to these games and losing the big one,” running back Brady Oliveira told me after one last on-field session on Saturday.
“We’ve done that twice in a row. It’s our time to change that. We have an amazing opportunity to change that and get a win on Sunday.
” Maybe this team didn’t reach this point in spite of the last two Grey Cup results, but rather because of them. “If I want to spin it positively, that’s what gets us here,” O’Shea said. “Maybe.
” We already know this is a rare breed, the first in more than 40 years to reach five straight CFL title games and the first in franchise history. So instead of being crushed by the last two Grey Cup games, perhaps its been galvanized. Even if it took until the second half of the season for the steel to fully form.
That first half, it looked more like shattered glass that nobody wanted to look into. “We had to block out a lot,” is how O-lineman Pat Neufeld put it. “Guys, even on a personal level, were looking around and wondering what’s going on.
But it’s OK. That’s adversity you need to face, and it’s better you face it early. It’s stuff that has calloused you as a player.
And that’s a good thing.” The turning point came with the 16-14 loss in Toronto, dropping the Bombers to 2-6. “They counted us out,” Oliveira said.
“And we continued to believe...
we trusted in our work ethic. And here we are.” If Oliveira has been more business this post-season, Willie Jefferson has been playing that card all week.
Gone is the Go-Pro camera the lanky Texan was wielding the last two Grey Cups, like a 6-foot-7 Martin Scorsese perfecting his cinematography skills. All that got him was footage he’ll never want to watch again. Lesson learned.
“Be locked in at all times,” Jefferson said. “Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t take your foot off the pedal.
Just stay on the gas, stay ready to go to work until the clock hits zero.” Jefferson arrived in Manitoba the same year as Collaros. It’s been Grey Cup or bust for both, ever since – they’ll start their fifth straight championship game on Sunday.
“This game is going to be special for both of us,” Jefferson said. “The first year we came, we did it. The second year, after COVID, we did it again, just to prove that we can stay on top.
But then we came back in ’22, couldn’t finish. And then same thing in ’23. This will be the year we came here to handle business.
“Zach is the leader of that crew on offence and I’m the leader of the crew on the defensive side. We need to show that we can take over, and finish.” Neufeld put it another way: “There’s still lots at the door.
We see a little crack. We’ve got to kick it open.” On the doorstep of greatness and the edge of the cliff.
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