Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

The Battalion began its march to the OHL final back in October behind a little known prospect named Matt Duchene.

Back in October, you would have had to bet a dollar to win a nickel if you were laying money down on the Windsor Spitfires making the Ontario Hockey League final. And the proposition would have been flipped if you were wagering on the then-ninth-placed Brampton Battalion to represent the Eastern Conference.

Okay, with the OHL final set to begin with Brampton visiting Windsor on Wednesday night, I'll stop well short of I-told-you. But I did suggest this after an early season match-up between the two teams. That night the Battalion took a one-goal lead into the third period in Windsor only to lose to the Spitfires 5-3:

"If the playoffs started today, they'd start without Brampton. I suspect they'll be in the post-season and nobody, Windsor included, would look forward to playing them."

I threw in this note for good measure:

"For 40 minutes Brampton outplayed Windsor and the Spitfires had the last change, no mean feat. And for 40 minutes the Battalion gave us a glimpse of the team they might be."

I'd look a lot more prescient if I'd stuck with my first draft, the version that read, "... nobody will look forward to playing them in the OHL final." Yup, that version had another passage describing the game as "a glimpse of what will be a fascinating showdown for a berth in the Memorial Cup."

Last time I water down a column like that.

Joking aside, a lot has changed since that game.

Start with the outfit at the south end of Highway 401.

The Spitfires moved out of the Windsor Arena, the beloved barn but a sadly out-dated major-junior venue, and they're installed at the WFCU Centre.

GM Warren Rychel had hoped the New York Islanders would eventually return Josh Bailey to the junior ranks but he had to resign himself to the fact that the Islanders would opt, as usual, for the unexpected and injudicious. So Rychel traded for several significant pieces to add to the roster: forward Scott Timmins, defenceman Ben Shutron and goaltender Josh Unice.

Back in October coach Bob Boughner has almost a surplus of weapons at his disposal-it seems like a matter of choosing which button to push, though the button marked PP was the fallback option. If nothing else was working out, Boughner counted on a powerplay that featured Ryan Ellis lasering shots back at the point, Andrei Loktionov creating on the halfboards and Taylor Hall and Dale Mitchell finishing lethally around the goal. What was true then of the Windsor power play is even more true at this juncture. The Spitfires' power play accounted for all goals, including Ellis's OT winner in Game 1 of their five-game Eastern final triumph over London. Though the power play numbers tightened up over the remaining games in the win over the Knights, a penalty kill against Windsor is still a scary prospect for any opponent of the Spitfires.

Windsor looked invulnerable back in October and now, well, a little less so (they lost three games in three rounds en route to the OHL finals, but on closer inspection it was not quite an easy roll). The semi-final with Plymouth was tied at two games apiece. Four of the five games against London were stretched to overtime. The Spitfires ran up football scores in the regular season and even against Plymouth and Sarnia in the first round treated opposing goaltenders like pinball bumpers … but still, the games tightened up more frequently. And thus did heroic efforts by Plymouth's Matt Hackett move him to the top of the rankings of draft-eligible goaltenders.

In October it looked like the Spitfires were on a mission. In stretches after, though, the players looked distracted or even a little bored with their all-too-frequent successes. As good as they have been, you'd have thought that Plymouth would have been a speed bump and London no big threat. Not how it turned out.

If Windsor is different, Brampton is transformed.

The key ingredients for the Battalion in the upcoming OHL final were in place back against Windsor in that game back in October.

Matt Duchene out-played Taylor Hall that night. Though he had a spate of injury a few weeks later (which had to contribute to exclusion from the world junior team's roster), Duchene has sustained a high level of play, enough so that Kyle Woodlief of the Red Line Report issued a notice in USA Today that ranks the Battalion centre ahead of London's John Tavares and Victor Hedman, the big Swedish defenceman. The International Scouting Service still has JT No. 1 but has slotted first runner-up for Duchene, just ahead of Hedman. ISS might want to re-evaluate. As good as Duchene has been this season, he has never been better than Friday night when he picked up a hat trick in the series-clincher against Belleville.

Cody Hodgson played in that game in Windsor back in October. Though he played well, he was still at that point getting over the disappointment of being a late cut of the Vancouver Canucks. No pouting though. He only raised his game this season, enough that The Hockey News's Future Watch labelled him the second-best prospect not skating in the NHL.

Evgeni Grachev also played in that loss to the Spitfires in Windsor but at that point he was struggling to find his game and his first goal. Six months, 40 regular-season goals and 11 playoff red lights later, Grachev has established himself as an absolute force in the O. At the under-20s in Ottawa he over-shadowed a Russian team-mate who was top-ranked in THN's Future Watch, Nikita Filatov. Straight ahead, in full flight, Grachev might be the fastest player in the league. A first option on PP and PK, you wouldn't recognize him today if you had only seen him against Windsor back in October.

Brampton went on a tear after I touted the team back in October, reeling off more than a month's worth of wins. That, though, only set the stage for another step up at the trading deadline. The most significant names added by general manager Stan Butler to the roster, goaltender Thomas McCollum and winger Anthony Peluso, have taken the Battalion to another level. I said at the time that I thought McCollum's deadline addition would have a bigger impact than Tavares's … well, the point is debatable. Still, it's hard to imagine Brampton being in the final without McCollum and Tavares inserted into the line-up wasn't enough to get London by Windsor.

It should be a memorable final. Windsor didn't just out-skill opponents, but rather beat them up in the process. Most fans who presume that Brampton is a one-line team (believe me, I heard from them last October when touting the Battalion) should be advised that Hodgson and Duchene play on different lines and that the supporting cast up front emerged as a huge factor in the series win over Belleville. Scott Tanski with two goals and Thomas Stajan with another were key players in a pivotal come-from-behind 4-3 win in Game 4 against the Bulls. In the second period of Game 6, Tanski, Stajan and Stephon Thorne were the team's best forwards when it looked like Belleville was going to force Game 7.

It's hard to read too much into the second of two regular season match-ups between these two teams, a 6-3 Windsor win in Brampton on January 4. Windsor's big centreman Greg Nemisz picked up two goals and an assist and was the game's first star. Windsor didn't have Ellis and Brampton was sans Hodgson and Grachev because of world junior commitments. And the trade-deadline additions were still just a doodles on the backs of Warren Rychel's and Stan Butler's napkins.

"Predictions are for gypsies," Toe Blake once said. Politically incorrect, these days. I'll offer up a prediction in the days leading up to Game 1.