Revellers, Bombers bask in Grey Cup glory – safely

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/12/2021 (1366 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The party didn’t spill into the streets or flood The Forks. There weren’t many fur coats, no cans of beer were hucked by fans and shotgunned by players, and not nearly so many hands reached out to high-five the jubilant victors.

Of all the things lost to COVID-19, in other words, the grassroots spontaneity of a Grey Cup parade is another.

Still, at least there was a celebration. So on Wednesday night, as trucks laden with Blue Bombers players made their long lap around IG Field, as the thousand or so fans in the stands threw up their arms and chanted and cheered, it felt like something more than just a moment Bombers fans had been waiting and hoping to repeat for just over two years.

It felt like a reminder of what we had before the pandemic, and what we must still fight to hang onto, and get back.

The fans started to flow into the stadium just after 5 p.m., peppering the seats with blue jerseys and swarming the Bombers store to snap up brand-new 108th Grey Cup champion merch. In the stands, parents huddled with young children, and the various colourful characters that make up the Bombers fan mosaic took their familiar places.

There was Transcona Cooch, who has been to every Grey Cup since 1974 and wears an iconic jersey celebrating his unlikely retention of his original liver. There was Bomber Woman, who cheers the team in a superhero cape. Many of these were the same diehards who’d stood out on Sunday night as pops of blue against the black-and-yellow sea of fans in Hamilton.

As the event got underway, video screens all over the stadium played highlights from the Bombers’ Grey Cup win; each time they reached that overtime interception that sealed the 33-25 final score over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, the fans in the stands rippled with euphoria, clapping and cheering all over again.

It wasn’t an easy night to be outside for a party. A haze hung over the stadium, a frigid mist that dusted the field and the stands and the tenacious fans; it hung over the bared chests of players who, still warmed by the win, cavorted around the stage. I asked Bomber Woman — real name: Tina Antonation — how she could endure the cold in her gold shorts.

“I figure, I was out there for seven hours at the Grey Cup, this is nothing,” she said, laughing in the joy of it all.

That’s the story of Bombers fans, though. They grab onto this team and never let go, not for tough times on the field, and certainly not for the cold. For them, Wednesday night’s celebration was, if more distant and controlled than the gleefully chaotic 2019 parade, still a meaningful send-off to a dream season that, at one point, wasn’t even certain to happen.

But was it right to hold it? The event fell at a strange time in the pandemic, one in which the province — and indeed, all of Canada — feels, once again, teetering on the edge between a manageable stasis and a catastrophic cliff. It came, in fact, on the same day chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin warned of an incoming omicron variant storm.

So when premier Heather Stefanson Tweeted that she’d see Bombers fans at the evening celebration, many on social media pushed back: “read the room,” one person wrote, and given the collective exhaustion over the rise and fall of waves and the ongoing demands on the health care system, one can understand the frustration.

In the end, by everything we know about how the virus works, the Bombers’ celebration was a relatively safe event. It was entirely outdoors, with plenty of space, and everyone in attendance was vaccinated. Stefanson and other leaders’s presence amounted to giving short speeches on a stage in the middle of the field; it was hardly a COVID-19 denial or distraction.

Still, it served as yet another example of the pandemic’s unbearable tension, the frustration that curdles in the space between groaning ICUs and lives that still have to be lived. There is something surreal about gathering by the thousands, while nurses burn out and surgeons cancel procedures and hospitals brace for a wave they might not be able to stand.

That tension won’t be going away. For the foreseeable future, we will have to keep living it.

So it’s strange to look back on the 2019 Grey Cup parade, and compare it to Wednesday’s managed celebration. Strange to think about how nobody back then knew that, just a few months later we’d be gripped by the most globally transformative health crisis in generations; strange to think how we’ve become inured to it since then, and how we’ve adapted.

In the end, Bombers fans still had a chance to savour that connection with the players that is so central to the CFL, that defines the heart of the Canadian league. It wasn’t as messy as 2019, and unlike that party there were no iconic, or even local-legendary images of pure celebration. But there was space for joy, and that has to count for something.

Ninety minutes after it began, the party was over. As fans trickled out of the stadium and onto sidewalks coated in a thin layer of new ice, fireworks burst over IG Field, bathing the city beyond in blue and gold light. And there’s no way to know when we’ll get to do this again, even if there were not a pandemic; so for now, let Winnipeg sleep tight.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca