Transported by Canada’s game — in Vegas

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/06/2023 (845 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Manitobans Mark Stone, Keegan Kolesar, Zach Whitecloud and Brett Howden are all Stanley Cup champions.” — Mike McIntyre, June 13, on Twitter.

If I had a loonie for every time I have been asked the escape question, I would have hired a contractor to tear down a home on Wellington Crescent, and build a new one.

The question is, “What do you do to get your mind off politics?

People who know me know that I was born in Europe, a decade after the end of the Second World War. The turbulence of the time and place caused my family to suffer gravely. Because politics affected my family in the most dramatic of ways, it has always been much more than just a spectator sport for me. And so it’s not surprising that having done so many interviews about my opinions, media career, and life, I would be asked about the escape hatch.

When the political mind needs relief, what does one do?

No matter how fancy the question, it always fetches a common one word answer — sports.

I watch sports on TV. I listen to play-by-play sports and sports talk on Sirius XM when I am driving, and I read about sports in all the familiar places, including the Free Press.

Because I appear here twice a week, people often ask if I have a favourite columnist. That one always draws one answer — Mike McIntyre.

He has an exceptional passion for Canada’s most important game and because I know him to be a brutally honest person, I have no doubt that he will deliver the straight goods. It won’t be the lapdog PR that one gets from far too many people in sports journalism, where their primary objective is to be liked by the owner and manager of whatever team they are covering.

Having done half a century of media work, I can tell you there is nothing I have less respect for in our business than professionals who care most about being liked by the privileged and powerful.

So on Tuesday night of this week, it will surprise no one to learn that my eyes were fixed on the Samsung screen, and there was no channel surfing. The clicker was nowhere near this writer’s paw. From 7 p.m. until 10 Winnipeg time, I was watching Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final from my favourite American city, Las Vegas.

There was no doubt in my mind that I was watching the deciding game even before it started.

Even though this team is a pup, only six years old, it has done the most amazing job I have ever seen of getting its fans emotionally connected to the game. No game in that barn is a chore. Every game is an event and you don’t have be inside my entertainment brain to know that every fibre of every player on that team — especially the captain, Manitoba-born Mark Stone — was programmed to win on Tuesday night and, in the process, win hockey’s holy grail.

If there was one problem with the deciding game it was the “p” word that plagues all of entertainment and that includes newspaper columns — predictability.

When you have certainty before the first puck is dropped or the first word is read about precisely how things will go, it fails to force your mind to make a clean getaway from wherever else it might stray and does not want to be.

The Las Vegas Golden Knights were never going to lose a game which would guarantee the grail.

They had multiple goaltenders, all of them playing at a high level, they had half the team on the playoff score sheet, and they had refused to show an ounce of exhaustion.

They were like folks at the slot machines at four in the morning. It may be 4 a.m. on the clocks that never make it to the walls of the casino, but to the players, time is irrelevant. When you’re on those machines, it’s not Central, Mountain, or Pacific Time.

It’s showtime. On Tuesday night, Vegas dominated the first period, filled the Florida net in the second, and ran up the score in the third. By the time it was over, Vegas had nine goals.

I have been watching the Stanley Cup playoffs for six decades and do not recall ever seeing a winning team in the deciding game tuck nine biscuits in the basket.

It might not have been life’s greatest escape ever.

But gosh it was good!

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

charles@charlesadler.com