Is it time to confirm the Blue are cursed?

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This article was published 03/10/2015 (3957 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Can we make it official now? Can we confirm that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are a cursed franchise? That the football gods absolutely despise this team and that a lower power is at work here?

Can even the most cold-hearted cynics now acknowledge that when long-time Bomber coach Dave Ritchie declared to the troops, ‘Remember boys, it’s Us against Them and Them is out to screw us!’ he might have been onto something?

Can we get a busload of priests, ASAP, to Investors Group Field for a gi-normous exorcism to rid the joint of the evil entities that have taken up residence there? And then, just for good measure, have them truck over to Polo Park to do the same thing where Winnipeg Stadium once stood?

I mean, how else do we rationally explain what happened Saturday afternoon in a 24-23 loss to the Edmonton Eskimos that drives another spike into a Bombers 2015 season that has been rife with botched plays and critical injuries, awful miscues, too many penalties and now, over the last two weeks, blown calls by the officials and a pair of kicks that clang off the uprights?

Saturday’s story could have been, perhaps should have been, about redemption for Lirim Hajrullahu, who missed four field goals and a convert and then connected on a 45-yarder with 62 seconds to go that put the Bombers up 23-21. Instead, his counterpart — Sean Whyte, a guy who was unemployed for weeks this summer after being cut by the Montreal Alouettes — crushed a 53-yarder with no time left in a 24-23 Eskimo win.

And so the Bombers, for the second week in a row, traded punches with one of the Canadian Football League’s elite squads but exited with diddly and squat to show for it.

But this has to be about more now than just what has unfolded this summer and fall.

It’s about Matt Dunigan blowing out his Achilles just before the playoffs in the 1993 season, leaving the Bombers to trot out Sammy Garza in the Grey Cup a few weeks later in a 33-23 loss to an Eskimos squad they had pulverized during the regular season.

It’s about a 14-4 powerhouse getting all fat and sassy leading up to the 2001 Grey Cup before falling to a Calgary Stampeders squad that was 8-10 — and would have been eliminated at the end of the season if the Bombers hadn’t rested a bunch of their regulars in game against the same crew.

It’s about Kevin Glenn breaking his arm in the 2007 East Division Final, introducing everyone to Ryan Dinwiddie in his first start as a pro a week later in a Grey-Cup loss to the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

It’s about Cal Murphy’s era ending with a 68-7 massacre in the playoffs, a defeat that then gave Bomber Nation Jeff Reinebold’s Reign of Error.

It’s about Mike Kelly handing things internally, about the gong show Joe Mack years, about Tim Burke’s famous — or infamous — ‘You can’t win the Kentucky Derby with a mule’ quote after another loss in the 3-15 nightmare of 2013.

That’s a quarter century of ugly, including a 20-48 record since their last Grey Cup appearance in 2011. And it was punctuated by what happened against the Esks on Saturday.

“I’ve seen the Bombers suffer some heartbreaking losses over the years,” tweeted CJOB’s hall-of-fame play-by-play man Bob Irving, a guy who has been around since before the days of Ralph/Dieter Brock, after the game. “This one versus Edmonton makes the Top 5. They deserve better.”

Afterwards, both Mike O’Shea and Matt Nichols were asked if God hates the Bombers. Both of them, of course, didn’t bite. But quizzed about the deserving-a-better-fate thing, Nichols said:

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“That’s just how it happens. Every team, when you start the season, you know you’re going to face some adversity and it’s how you respond from it. Same thing with injuries. They can do one or two things right now: this team can decide it’s going to go into the tank and call it a season. Or this team can say we just took the two best teams down to the wire and we’re good enough to beat anyone.

“We don’t feel like anyone’s against us. We just feel like we’ve got to make a few more plays here and there and we can win these games.”

Heard that a thousand times. Written it a hundred more. The Bombers can talk all they want about rallying around each other. We say now a prayer or two to St. Jude — the patron saint of lost causes — wouldn’t hurt, either.

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPEdTait