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 Spitfires stars came to play while the Rockets best players faded in the Memorial Cup final.

RIMOUSKI, Que. -- About seven minutes into the Memorial Cup semi-final, Kelowna's Jamie Benn, the Rockets' leading scorer, took a healthy run at Taylor Hall as the fleet Windsor forward skated down the left wing. It looked like Benn was poised to deliver a knockout blow to the Spitfires' fire-starter.

At the last split second Hall caught Benn out of the corner of his eye, ducked and skated into the open ice with the puck. Behind him, Benn was crumpled on the ice and unable to get to the Kelowna bench. He ended up down in a heap at centre ice, roughly where they would roll out the red carpet and carry out the Memorial Cup a couple of hours.

That vignette fairly represented the trials for the Western Hockey League champions Sunday afternoon. Right idea, just a little late.

And that vignette also captured the essence of the Spitfires in this tournament. Just like Hall finding daylight when it looked like his lights were going to be shut out, the Spitfires were nearly knocked reeling but left the field in their wake.

The final score was Windsor 4, Kelowna 1 in an unsuspenseful conclusion to the 90th Memorial Cup.

First to Benn, the expected source of the Rockets' offence and the embodiment of their struggles.

I suspect he took his run at Hall out of frustration. Or maybe he had it in his mind that the Rockets needed the emotional lift that a big hit and take-out of the Spitfires' star forward would have given them. Though the game was only seven minutes old at that point it was already 2-0 for Windsor and goaltender Mark Guggenberger hadn't registered a save.

When Benn was down on the ice, his team-mates had to believe that their good times were at an end.

Benn returned to the game a few shifts later but the Rockets were down 3-0 at that point, with Guggenberger pulled after the Spitfires' third shot eluded him as well.

Benn didn't look like the player who scored four goals against Drummondville in the opening round. He showed one flash of his talent off of the opening faceoff of the second period he rushed down the ice past defenceman Harry Young and started a play that led to a goal by Colin Young. But that was as good as it got for Benn. Otherwise he was a liability not an asset-drawing a boarding penalty for running defenceman Ryan Ellis from behind and a double minor for high-sticking in the second period.

And the Rockets didn't look like the team that had knocked of two of the nation's top four teams in the WHL playoffs.

For their part in the final Windsor looked exactly like the team that roared through the Ontario Hockey League this season.

Taylor Hall and Ryan Ellis get the vast majority of the ink because of their offence and pro prospects, so the Spitfires' depth is lost in the hype. The rest of the cast made the difference in the final.

"We knew we had a heck of a team at the start of the season and a great shot at winning the league," Ellis said. "We had a lot of talent and we knew that [management] would go out an acquire players on the deadline ... players who could put us over the top."

On the first goal less than four minutes in, Kelowna's Mikael Backlund had all kinds of time to clear the puck out the Rockets' end but looked to bolt out on his own. Backlund, a first-round draft choice of the Calgary Flames, had only open ice ahead of him, but he didn't check his rearview. Greg Nemisz, another Calgary first-rounder, picked his pocket and set up Adam Henrique who one-timed past Guggenberger.

"The first goal was huge for us," Nemisz said. "We knew Kelowna had five days off and would be coming out at us hard. We had to get through those first bunch of shifts … and if we had a lead then we'd be in good shape."

A couple of shifts later Dale Mitchell came barreling down the right wing on a straight line. Kelowna defenceman Tysen Dowzak lined him up and took a big shot at him. Dowzak is inches taller than Mitchell but it was like a pin pushing back at a bowling ball. Mitchell deflected off a sprawling Dowzak and poured in on goal. Two-zip.

Rockets forward Kyle St Denis tried to follow Benn's lead when he took a run at defenceman Mark Cundari and wound up with a kneeing minor. A point shot from overage blueliner Rob Kwiet put Windsor in front by three barely seven minutes into the game.

The rest wasn't a formality but it sure felt that way. They had to know that they were just shifts away from a national championship. A few days ago they were shifts away from elimination from the tournament in the minimum three games.

The Spitfires dropped their first two games in Rimouski to Quebec league champions Drummondville and the host Oceanic. At that point they were going to need four consecutive wins to capture the Memorial Cup. A pretty tall order, especially given that they looked off-form. After their semi-final win over the Voltigeurs Friday, I stated here that the Spitfires were raising their game with every period. Well, on Sunday afternoon, for a dozen or so shifts off the top of the game, the Rockets, like Benn with Hall, couldn't stop the Spitfires. They couldn't even find them.

Stuff that fell out of my notebook … Some writers can claim to have been there for all of a famous name's Hall of Fame moments. I'll bet I'm the only one who was attendance for both of Windsor general manager Warren Rychel's career highlights. As noted in this placeline, I was attendance at the Colisee when the Spitfires captured the Memorial Cup. I was also there when he raised the Stanley Cup in 1996 after the Avalanche knocked off the Panthers in triple overtime in Game 4 of a drama-free final. I went back to the clips and found that I actually mentioned Rychel in my game story. Not for a goal - there was just one, Uwe Krupp's, in the dead of a Miami night. No, Rychel earned special mention for steam-rolling Florida's netminder John Vanbiesbrouck … I can't overstate what a disappointment Kelowna's Swedish import Mikael Backlund was in this tournament. Someone remarked to me yesterday that he was invisible here. That wasn't the case. It was Backlund who made the egregious giveaway on the first goal, a real spirit-buster. If he'd only been invisible, maybe the Rockets would have got on track early.