Not just an aberration

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/10/2009 (5838 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Looking for that last-minute Halloween costume?

Go as a Winnipeg Blue Bomber. Your options, apparently, will be many.

Example: "Hey, nice Bombers costume, dude."

"No, I’m a vampire. You can’t kill me…at least, until Wally Buono drives a wooden stake through my heart."

Or…

"No, I’m the ghost of Michael Bishop’s career before the Bombers resurrected me in July. Boo."

Or…

"No, I’m Superman. Or Adarius Bowman. Or maybe I’m Milt Stegall from 1997."

You get the drift. But go figure. It wasn’t so long ago that even the Winnipeg Blue Bombers didn’t want to dress up as Bombers. Ask Barrin Simpson. This was a football team about one more loss away from implosion. Nothing was working. It was a witch’s brew. Great gobs of fans were revolting. Just like their 3-8 local twelve.

One simple victory over the hapless Toronto Argonauts wasn’t enough to turn heads. Nor was a victory over the Edmonton Eskimos the very next week, a contest played before the smallest Bombers home crowd in over a decade.

But what transpired at Ivor Wynne Stadium on Thanksgiving Monday can’t be ignored or marginalized. Neither can it be singled out as an aberration, such as the mid-season, run-happy romp over the then-struggling B.C. Lions.

Look, getting out of Hamilton with a ‘W’ would have been victory enough for a team that has been on a tightrope without a net for about a month now. Just to be able to feel the words "second place" roll off their tongues would have been considered a feast from all the famine, all the trimmings included. But to waltz into enemy territory and pound the Tiger-Cats into submission — to fly out to a 21-0 lead in the process — in such a critical contest is a giant leap forward for a team which now can legitimately talk about a playoff future.

For all the grief that has befallen the Bombers in a manic, often desperate season, that much must be granted them.

No, this isn’t about overreacting to three straight wins, especially considering the Bombers, now 6-8, still have back-to-back dates with CFL powerhouse Montreal Alouettes sandwiched between crucial meetings with playoff rivals — the Lions, now 7-7, and the flagging 6-8 Tiger-Cats. (The Edmonton Eskimos, another potential crossover team from the West, are also 6-8). It is, however, about acknowledging that the ghosts — the ones that go, ‘Booo’ — which haunted the Bombers much of the summer have gone the way of Canadian geese.

Seriously, everybody involved knew the stakes. Anything but three straight wins would probably have been fatal. Crowds would have continued to shrink. Coach Kelly would be under siege.

So what now that the exact opposite has unfolded, that Kelly’s Bombers would respond in the face of such adversity with consecutive victories over the very teams they absolutely, unequivocally needed to beat?

After all, it’s been awful quiet around Bomberville for awhile now — and that’s a good thing. And it’s all along been posited by any reasonable observer, based on the offensive malaise that had been the Bombers’ bane for the first half of the 2009 season, that a functional quarterback was perhaps the only thing standing between the Bombers and respectability. Well, Bishop threw for over 350 yards in Hamilton. Bowman hauled in 10 passes for 213 yards. Total Bombers offence: 474 yards. Such gaudy statistics would have been considered sheer fiction just over three weeks ago.

Don’t look now, but the circus has left town. And if the Bombers — and Mr. Kelly included — have earned anything, it’s that what happened in the summer stays in the summer. Kinda like Vegas. If critics can, and have, dumped all over this franchise for mounting losses and embarrassing antics, then a team that instead produces a modest string of victories and no self-inflicted controversy (don’t count Simpson, that’s on him) deserves a little more benefit and a little less doubt. It’s only fair, right?

Hey, there’s been ample reason for skepticism. Still is, in fact. But rarely any evidence for immediate hope.

Until now. At one point earlier last week, the Bombers were about 10-point dogs against the Cats. If anybody believed, they weren’t bookies. But once again, the Bombers donned their costumes, hit the road, and came home with all the treats.

Yes, the Bombers have been dressed up as a lot of things this season, many of them unflattering.

But they’ve never been scary.

Weird, though. Is there anything more frightening than something that, no matter how many times you try to kill it — heck, no matter how many times it tries to kill itself — just won’t die?

Finally, after all this time, the Bombers have themselves a horror show worth watching.

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca

Randy Turner
Reporter

Randy Turner spent much of his journalistic career on the road. A lot of roads. Dirt roads, snow-packed roads, U.S. interstates and foreign highways. In other words, he got a lot of kilometres on the odometer, if you know what we mean.

   Read full biography