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.

A poetic license is not necessary to say that the Spitfires' run to a championship started in the game when the team honored its captain.

The Windsor Spitfires’ triumph at the Memorial Cup was a great conclusion to the junior hockey season. They were deserving champions given its run of play from September until May. Maybe there was a notion that its Memorial Cup triumph was devalued by the absence of the Calgary Hitmen, the team that challenged Windsor for the top spot in the CHL rankings all season. That notion was laid to waste with the abundant ease with which the Spitfires knocked off the Kelowna Rockets, the WHL champs, in the Memorial Cup final Sunday in Rimouski.

In the lead-up to the Spitfires’ final opening-round game in Rimouski I wrote that the team hadn’t faced a must-win game until they had to beat Kelowna just to qualify for the tie-breaker. Hadn’t faced a must-win game. That much was technically true of its season. But on further review—after travelling the length of the St Lawrence—I realize that I probably did a lot of the players on the Windsor team a disservice on that count. I certainly didn’t give the Spitfires’ necessary and deserved credit for persevering in the toughest of circumstances.

Maybe it was just the fog of dozens of junior games at the end of a season. Maybe it was just the fog that blew into Rimouski. I should have given Windsor full credit for one of the most stirring performances I’ve witnessed in any arena.

I was in the old Windsor Arena at the end of February last year for the Spitfires’ first game back after the sudden death of its captain Mickey Renaud. I set the scene for readers of espn.com (here’s the link to my account). Not that any words on a page or a screen can capture the emotions of that night. No, I went back to my hotel room and had to wring myself out so I could start typing. And I was by no means close to the scene. I can’t even imagine what the players went through. I have no idea how general manager Warren Rychel and coach Bob Boughner were able to keep themselves together, never mind how they kept its team in any sort of shape to play.

I don’t think that I have to take poetic license to say that the Spitfires’ run to a championship started with that game.

It wasn’t a must-win for the Spitfires, I suppose. Just a can’t-lose. It wasn’t a matter of needing two points for a decent slot in the standings and it wasn’t a matter of staying alive in the playoffs. It was all about honoring the memory of its friend and team-mate and anything less than its best game would be something that would have haunted them.

It was a situation that 99 percent of players never have to go through. Making it even tougher was the fact that Windsor, a very young team, was in against the veteran-laden Belleville Bulls, the second best team in the OHL that season, an outfit that would go on to the 2008 Memorial Cup semi-final a couple of months later.

I suspect few in attendance that night remember much about the game and I’m sure that images from the pregame ceremony are burned in the memories of everyone who was crowded into the old barn. The Windsor players all wearing Spitfires sweaters with Mickey Renaud’s No. 18 and the captain’s C. The players skating out to centre ice and laying the sweaters on a table.

I didn’t have a seat. The old barn could seat two, uncomfortably, in the press box and local chroniclers were stationed there. I sat on the steps, just in front of the last row. All around me people were sobbing.

Belleville won that game 4-3 in a shootout but the Spitfires covered themselves in glory that night. More on adrenaline that talent, they soundly outplayed the Bulls, outshooting them 43-27. They came back to tie the game in the third period, a goal by Taylor Hall sending it into overtime.

It’s fitting that Hall, the best Windsor player that night, went on to be named the Memorial Cup most valuable player fifteen months later. A lot has changed in the time since Mickey Renaud’s death. The Spitfires moved out of the old barn and into a shiny new arena. Windsor, hardscrabble at the best of times, is now in unprecedented economic straits. But there are constants. Warren Rychel and Bob Boughner are still in place. So too are a corps of players constituting the heart of the line-up: forwards Taylor Hall, Adam Henrique, Richard Greenhop, Connor O’Donnell, Justin Shugg, Greg Nemisz and Eric Wellwood; defencemen Ryan Ellis, Rob Kwiet, Mark Cundari and Harry Young; and goaltender Andrew Engelage.

“We think about Mickey every day, every time where in the room,” Hall said in Rimouski. “We were a team before he died but his death brought us that much closer together.”

It brought them together and it elevated them.

I wrote after that game last year that I saw Hall grow up on the ice over the course of 65 minutes. In retrospect, I didn’t give enough credit to the others. Hall was hardly alone in growing up fast, maybe even overnight. A lot of his team-mates did as well. The Spitfires tore it up the rest of the 2007-08 season but in the playoffs they ran into a Sarnia team that featured the best junior player in the land, Steven Stamkos, playing the game better than he ever had before. Another learning experience.

The Spitfires played with an almost unsettling degree of confidence over the course of the 2008-09 season. No matter what challenge they were going to face during a game it was nothing compared to the challenge they faced just stepping on the ice for the pre-game ceremony after Mickey Renaud’s death. Next to that, winning four straight games at the Memorial Cup was a pleasure skate.