I Was Just There

If you are the observant type, you might have noticed in my profile thingy (or a post or two) that I'm from Alberta.

And in Alberta, there are two hockey teams.

There's the Oilers, and then some other cowboy team or something that sucks anyway.

Tonight (well, last night), was, as Dan Tencer and Rob Brown of 630 CHED reminded us about a thousand times, historic. Especially for an Oilers fan.

Sam Ganger scored eight points in a game -- four goals, four assists. He has tied the record for most points in a game (in the Oilers franchise at least), a record previously made by only two other men.

One was Paul Coffey. The other, who actually accomplished this feat twice, went by the name Wayne Gretzky.

Oh, and actually -- Ganger scored all eight points in the last two-thirds of the game.

I'm just young enough to have missed the Oilers' so-called glory years of the 1980s, so this is completely new to me. I'm also a bit of a latecomer to Canada's national sport, so I also managed to miss the remainder of Wayne Gretzky's career.

I've never been witness to anything like this before.

Certainly, Sam Ganger is no Wayne Gretzky (not at this point anyway), but it's a thrilling peek at what the Oilers have been at one point and will be again... and if they keep adding skilled young players like this, that will be fairly soon.

I guess I'm just trying to add my voice to the crowd, to be able to say, when I'm seventy-five years old or so, "I remember that night. I heard Jack Michaels screaming with shocked exhilaration the word 'SCORES!' over the blaring horn and the deafening roar of 16,839 fans eight times through my radio speakers as I sat in my room unable to concentrate on any of the blogs I was trying to catch up on. I wasn't in the arena that night, but I was there when it happened."


I'm not quite sure what to think of the fact that as the Oilers were down 1-0 in the first period (a score usually quite hazardous to their health), I said, "Why do the Oilers even bother playing anymore? They never win."

If saying that is going to get these sorts of results, I'll gladly say it again on Saturday when they play next.