• The Pictou County Peewee AAA Crushers have a rare opportunity right in from of them: a chance to win an Atlantic Peewee hockey title on home ice, when champions from all four eastern provinces gather in Pictou County.
They didn’t fare so well for them at the recent Nova Scotia championship tournament, going winless in four games, but the good news about that is, they played about as bad as they possibly could, so there’s nowhere to go but up.
Now comes the possibility of redemption, and we’ve seen it happen here before: an underdog digging deep, pulling off a colossal upset. As veteran local hockey coach Clary Melanson said after the Junior A Crushers won the 2008 Fred Page Cup at JBM Stadium, “we wanted it more than they did.”
Wanting it more doesn’t always make it happen, but sometimes it does.
• It wasn’t a good weekend for female hockey.
Our local Peewee AA girls, hosting provincials over in Pictou, played well enough but didn’t have luck on their side, going winless (0-4-1) at Hector Arena.
The Midget AA Selects also fell short this past weekend, playing at their season-ending championship tournament.
To top all that off, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) announced they would be shutting down, barely a week after the Calgary Inferno – Stellarton native Blayre Turnbull played on that team – captured the league championship.
It was a nice option for elite players to have, and no one wanted to see that taken away, but if not enough people are buying tickets (which I assume is the root of the problem), it simply comes down to dollars and cents.
• A Somber Anniversary
This coming Saturday will mark the first anniversary of the Humboldt Broncos tragedy, where 16 people associated with the junior hockey team lost their lives in a devastating collision with a tractor-trailer. A total of 10 players, two coaches, a volunteer, a physical therapist and a radio announcer were all killed.
It resonated deeply with Canadians because so many parents have put their kids on a team bus, confident that nothing bad will happen, but knowing, in dark places we don’t like to visit, that the possibility always exists. Life can turn in a heartbeat.
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Non-Sports Thought of the Week:
• It’s official now, if it wasn’t already: we have, in our Prime Minister, a smarmy elitist.
At a recent Liberal party function that cost $1,500 a ticket, Justin Trudeau was caught, on videotape, mocking a protestor who was being dragged out of the fundraiser (the protester wasn’t making fun of Trudeau’s hair or something equally frivolous, she was trying to draw attention to the impact of mercury poisoning in the waters of Grassy Narrows First Nation, located in Northern Ontario).
“Thank you very much for your donations tonight, I really appreciate the donation to the Liberal Party of Canada,” Trudeau smirked, in a condescending tone that under other circumstances, in other places, might have gotten him a punch in the face.
Of course, once the incident exploded all over him, he was quick to issue an apology that almost sounded sincere (I’m sure Trudeau really was sorry: he was sorry he got caught on video camera).
Bad look, and certainly not for the first time.
Kevin Adshade is a writer with The News. His column appears each week.