Last week in Edmonton, the finale of the 2010 Canadian Football League season played out between the Montreal Alouettes and Saskatchewan Roughriders. There was an acute sense of déjà vu, as the same two teams had met for the 2009 championship a year earlier.
Both games were close, though this year’s version could not touch last year’s, which will live on forever because of the shocking mental lapse that caused Saskatchewan to lose. They had too many men on the field for what would have been the game-ending play; instead, Montreal got another shot at a game-winning field goal and made it.
Of course, the Grey Cup is only 60 minutes of football, and it caps a campaign that begins every year in May and entails 18 regular season games. The 2010 version, like all others, came with its share of pleasant surprises, disappointment, and predictability.
The least surprising outcome this year? The Montreal Alouettes’ Eastern Division championship and subsequent Grey Cup appearance.
The East Division may as well be called the Alouettes Division, as they’ve made eight of this decade’s 10 Grey Cup appearances as the eastern representative. The team has only walked away with three Grey Cup victories, but that’s certainly a dynasty by any standard.
More surprising than the Als’ presence in the big game is the fashion in which they got there. It wasn’t surprising, painful as it is to admit, that they steamrolled the Toronto Argonauts 48–17 in the Eastern Division final the previous week. What was surprising is that the recently hapless Argos found themselves in a position to be one win away from reaching the Grey Cup in the first place, even if they came up abysmally short in that one game.
In 2009 the Argos went 3–15, missing the playoffs. Their coach, with no previous coaching experience in the CFL, got into a fight with their star offensive player Arland Bruce III, and sent him Toronto’s arch-rival, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
This year, the American-born (but CFL-seasoned) Jim Barker took over. It was his show from the get-go, and he made moves based on his own intuition, even though many of them baffled critics throughout the year.
Still, his starting quarterback — an NFL cast-off named Cleo Lemon who scuffled badly in his first full year in the CFL — pulled through to a 9–9 record with help from the defence, one significantly better than what most Argos fans would have settled for before the season.
The Argos then found a way to beat their rival in a playoff showdown on the road in front of a notoriously hostile Hamilton crowd. It was a tight 16–13 win that came down to the last play, but it represented a remarkable turnaround, both symbolically and in substance, for a club that appeared utterly hopeless just a year before.
In a small league, some predictability is inevitable. That the Montreal Alouettes found themselves in the Grey Cup is no surprise. But the Argos’ unlikely bounce-back year illustrates that CFL fans can always count on at least one unexpected storyline to pop up every year.
