Back in the spotlight

WINNIPEG — You have to live in Hamilton, or Regina, or Quebec City to know the depth of what a Winnipeg sports fan is feeling today.

You have to know what it’s like to be a minor league sports city; to live down the road from the Torontos and the Vancouvers—in those cities where Canadian Football League or junior hockey, is king because, well, there isn’t anything bigger than that.

For Winnipeg, the return of the Jets is about the city’s reaffirmation as a big league town. A return to the agate pages of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, onto the ESPN ticker, or highlights on Connected every night of the season.

For a Blue Bombers fan, seeing the word "Winnipeg" on a Madison Square Garden Network telecast is an affirmation that this city is back in the ring.

And on Sunday, when the Jets skate out there against the vaunted jerseys of the Montreal Canadiens, all of that will spill out.

"I won't be sitting missing any moments," Jets head coach Claude Noel said of Opening Day. "I'm walking out there for the warmup, and I'll be walking out there for the start of the game. I will smell the roses, there's no doubt.

"Life's too short, I learned that a long time ago," he said. "When people get sick (who are) near you, that you love, you learn to enjoy every minute of every day."

It is that kind of game. The type that each and every player will tell his grandchildren about one day. It is why the Canadian hockey media has flocked there, over-flowing the newly built press box into the refurbished press room at ice level.

"Pretty epic," said Jets captain Andrew Ladd. "It’s like a Stanley Cup final, or a Winter Classic. You have family in town, things going on … it makes it more enjoyable for everybody to have all that surrounding it."

Co-owner Mark Chipman had money ready to buy the Jets back in ’96, and moved that stack of cash over to the American Hockey League after the Jets went to Phoenix, securing the Manitoba Moose. Now, he has become the anti-Jim Balsillie: that quiet owner who waited patiently in the wings, playing by the NHL’s rules for long enough that when they needed to park a flagging Atlanta Thrashers somewhere, Winnipeg was the lone obvious destination.

"I can’t tell you that when we started the (Moose) we felt like that this day would absolutely come," Chipman said. "We started the Moose because … we thought we should have a hockey team. And if we had a hockey team and kept hockey alive here, there would be a better chance of maybe one day — if it worked again, we’d have a chance at it. It really wasn’t until much later on in the life of our organization that this became a reality."

Long before it became a reality however, it has been a dream here.

Web sites that have been operational for a decade; the MTS Centre, which went up in 2004 and always carried the term, "NHL ready."

All the while, kids here grew up with the memories of what was, and the faint hope that one day, they would be able to forget about that last playoff game in 1996. The one attended by Jets defenceman Derek Meech, a 12-year-old with his father, the son painting his face white, with big Jets logos on either cheek.

"There wasn’t a dry eye in the building," Meech said Saturday, thinking back to that day. "You looked around the rink and all the fans were crying, and you looked down on the ice surface and the players are crying."

Did he cry?

"I cried, oh yeah," said Meech, who is a likely scratch Sunday. "My favorite team, leaving the city? It was a heart-breaker. It was hard to see them leave."

But it feels even better, now that they’re back.

Said Meech: "I was thinking of painting my face, but…"

Mark Spector is the senior columnist on sportsnet.ca