Auston, Winnipeg bound by Glendale

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/10/2016 (3269 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As origin stories go, Auston Matthews has a dandy:

A kid growing up in the desert (of all places) falls in love with ice hockey (of all sports) when his father and uncle take him to see the Phoenix Coyotes (of all teams) at the age of two.

Good story, as far as it goes.

But that’s the thing — it doesn’t go far enough.

What’s missing from all the folklore that’s already sprouted up around the Toronto Maple Leafs’ phenom is the kid’s story actually began at Portage and Main on the frozen, bald prairie — where all great hockey stories originate — long before it began in Glendale, Ariz.

Four years before that precocious toddler walked into that Arizona arena circa 1999, a group of Manitoba politicians and businessmen gathered 30 floors above Canada’s coldest intersection, failing the tens of thousands of hockey fans gathered below at a “Save Our Jets” rally.

With that failure, a series of dominoes were sent tumbling that resulted in the Jets moving to Glendale, Matthews being moved to take up hockey, and, this year, the hockey world moved to admit the best young prospect in the game hails from a place where 30 C is considered sweater weather.

It is called the “butterfly effect” — the idea a butterfly landing on a giraffe’s butt in Africa last year can set in motion a chain of events that results in your child failing his history exam next week.

Or to put it another way: Auston Matthews is succeeding so spectacularly at hockey because, once upon a time, Winnipeg failed so spectacularly at it.

The kid owes us one, is what I’m saying. And after some poking and prodding in the Toronto Maple Leafs dressing room Wednesday at the MTS Centre, he admitted as much.

“If they didn’t move down there in 1996 or 1997, whenever it was (1996), I wouldn’t be playing hockey,” said Matthews. “So I guess I’m pretty fortunate for that to happen.”

Yes, you are, junior. And your good fortune was 15 years of misery — and some very long winters — in these parts.

So, yeah, you’re welcome.

The only thing more fitting than Matthews playing one of the first games of his NHL career in the city that made hockey a possibility for him was the fact he did it on the same night the Jets finally caught up with the Coyotes and hung a Bobby Hull banner from the rafters of the MTS Centre.

How about that for serendipity? After five-plus seasons of stubbornly refusing to recognize any of the former players from Jets 1.0, franchise ownership finally gives in and hangs banners honouring the Hot Line on the same night Matthews — the No. 1 pick in this year’s NHL Draft who grew up in Arizona staring at banners honouring Hull, Dale Hawerchuk and Thomas Steen — makes his MTS Centre debut?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Then there’s this: how perfect is it a player who owes his career path to Winnipeg’s failure to keep its first NHL team is locked in a rivalry with another prodigious rookie (Jets winger and No. 2 pick in 2016 Patrik Laine) who is absolutely critical to the success of the second one?

Both Matthews and Laine fought a losing battle this week in trying to tamp down any talk of their personal rivalry in advance of the first NHL meeting between the two teen phenoms.

Both men said all the right things about Wednesday’s game being a contest between the Maple Leafs and the Jets, not Matthews and Laine.

Which is true, of course, but it also required you to ignore a long history between the two that includes Laine telling anyone who would listen last spring he thinks he’s the better of the two players.

If you think these two guys aren’t at least a little invested in bettering one another, you haven’t been paying attention.

It was left to Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock to speak the truth about the rivalry this week — although accidentally.

Babcock let slip the word “cockiness” when discussing Laine with reporters in Toronto earlier this week. The coach immediately took it back, but you couldn’t help thinking the only thing Babcock regretted was revealing what the Maple Leafs think of Matthews’ principal rival.

It was perhaps not coincidental, therefore, Jets head coach Paul Maurice went out of his way Wednesday to talk about how “humble” Laine has been in the Winnipeg dressing room.

It was a passionate defence of a young man who is a lot more than his most public — and controversial — pronouncements.

The final word on this remarkable day, however, went to Laine, who scored twice in the third period to help the Jets erase what had been a 4-0 second-period deficit and then completed one of the most memorable hat tricks an NHL fan will witness with the game-winner in overtime — just moments after Jets netminder Michael Hutchinson had stoned Matthews on a breakaway.

So in the end, they were right — this one wasn’t about Matthews and Laine.

In the end, this one was just about Laine.

On a night the Jets honoured their past, it was their present and their future in the person of Laine who made the most lasting memory.

And Matthews? Well, somewhere another butterfly landed on another giraffe’s butt. And this time, they were Jets fans.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca          

Twitter: @PaulWiecek