Four-ward to the final

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This article was published 21/02/2015 (4101 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MOOSE JAW, Sask. — One year to the day since she clutched Olympic gold, Jennifer Jones took one step closer to taking the 2015 Scotties Tournament of Hearts.

Curling before a wildly appreciative crowd at Mosaic Place on Friday night, Jones put away Alberta’s Val Sweeting, 8-6, to earn her berth in Sunday’s final.

Now, Sweeting will wait to learn her rival in today’s 3 p.m. semifinal. It will either be Saskatchewan’s Stefanie Lawton, who finished third, or two-time defending Canadian champion Rachel Homan, who barely seized the final playoff berth.

While that’s shaking out, Team Manitoba will take the time to rest, and Jones plans to spend some quality time with her daughter. This will be her eighth trip to a Scotties final, and if she can win, she will become just the second curler in history to skip a team to at least five titles. (Nova Scotia’s Colleen Jones won six Canadian championships while calling shots.)

The fact of the win wasn’t a total surprise, not after the way Jones, third Kaitlyn Lawes, second Jill Officer and lead Dawn McEwen played in the days leading up to Friday night. They’d thumped Alberta already that morning, a 10-5 trouncing built on a three-point start and a couple of devastating steals.

At first, it seemed like the page would read from the same script. In a delicate first end, Jones’ foursome pounced on a couple of painful Team Alberta misses — a flash on an attempted peel by Dana Ferguson, a heavy Sweeting draw — to score four right off the top.

This time, though, Sweeting rebounded. Over and again, the Albertans choked off Jones’ options, sending rock after rock to nestle against and cut off Manitoba’s yellow stones. That strategy pushed Jones into a couple of whiffs in the fourth and fifth, each time picking up a stolen single. Jones settled for one to take a 5-3 lead after the break, and Sweeting closed the seventh with a draw for a deuce to tie the game.

“They made some great shots, and we were just a little bit off,” Jones said. “But we never lost control, and we felt good out there.”

Manitoba picked up two in the eighth to keep pace, and the comeback road for Sweeting began to slip away. What turned it: Two slick runback doubles in the ninth, first from Lawes and then from Jones, which left the Albertan skip little to work with. She hit for a single, and was down one coming home.

“It was huge,” Jones said of that sequence. “It’s so different to be tied up coming home with, and one-up coming home with. Kaitlyn’s just played so well all week, made some huge shots when we needed them. Those doubles in nine, I think, were probably the key shots of the game.”

It has been a smooth week at Mosaic Place, though by the headlines, far from a sensational one. In the end, despite a flurry of wacky last-minute games (New Brunswick toppled Homan, Sweeting flopped against Lawton), the top four finished on top — though in a slightly different order than some would have guessed.

If any one team this year forced the curling world to take notice, it was Northern Ontario’s Tracy Horgan.

Horgan has been to the Scotties before, as an Ontario champion three seasons ago. This time, the Sudbury skip became the first curler ever to lead a team from Northern Ontario into the Tournament of Hearts. She had to battle through a qualification round in Moose Jaw just to work her way onto the main draw.

She won those three games. As the week wore on, she won six more. Some of those came against struggling teams — a win over New Brunswick, another over Team B.C. — but Horgan’s foursome also upset Saskatchewan’s Stefanie Lawton, who finished third, and overcame their friends on Team Ontario.

It came down to Friday morning, when Horgan had a shot to play on the weekend — all she had to do was beat Team Canada’s Rachel Homan.

It seemed a tall order coming in, but Horgan put up stiff resistance against the reigning Canadian champions. The teams were tied up after eight, and with Horgan holding a hammer in nine, the path to a major upset win was coming into view.

Homan played that end out right. Horgan’s last shot came in too light, and with that Team Canada took a steal of two and what would be a winning 6-4 lead.

It was a tough loss for Horgan, her sister and third Jennifer Horgan, second Jenna Enge and lead Amanda Gates. As they left the sheet, they paused to embrace their friends from Ontario’s Julie Hastings rink, and wiped away a few bittersweet tears.

No shame in where it ended, though — in this year’s push, the spunky team from the Idylwylde Golf and Country Club made Canada take notice.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca