The Hamilton Spectator

Bulldogs fall to Saint John in Memorial Cup final

Dream of a national championship comes up one win short

SCOTT RADLEY

The morning of the Memorial Cup championship game, there wasn’t even a thought among the Hamilton Bulldogs that there was a chance they might lose.

They were going to win. They were certain of it. The Cup would be paraded into Gore Park on Thursday. There was almost a sense of destiny to it. After all, every time they needed a win this season, they got it.

Turns out on this day, destiny was with the hosts.

The Bulldogs fell 6-3 to the Saint John Sea Dogs on Wednesday night, leaving the greatest season in franchise history one victory short of perfection.

Pretty much everything that happened this year had pointed to a sip from a cup at the end. This was a team that won so often and lost so seldom that each defeat felt like a shock.

The question most nights wasn’t, would the Bulldogs win, it was, how big would the gap be?

This lineup was a machine.

It had star players who lived up to their billing. It had role players who accepted those tasks happily. It had championship-calibre goaltending, which is the backbone of any title hopeful.

More than that, it was a group that really liked each other and loved playing for each other. Player after player after player talked about that all year.

“This is definitely the tightest group I’ve ever played on my whole career,” Mason McTavish said the other day.

Literally any other player you talked to said something similar. HBO’s marketing department didn’t use the phrase “Band of Brothers” as often as these guys.

And it was a team that rose to the occasion. When the season was on the line in Game 7 of the OHL

championship, it played a beauty of a game and won. When the season was on the line on last Thursday against the Edmonton Oil Kings, it was sensational. When the season was on the line in overtime of the semifinal against Shawinigan, it found a way.

It all just made the next step — the final step — feel inevitable.

The only question was, could the battered, beaten-up, fatigued Bulldogs find one more game’s worth of high octane fuel in their legs to keep up with the lavishly rested Sea Dogs, who’d been eliminated from their league playoffs in the first round more than a month before. Could the guys whose uniforms are black and gold but whose bodies are black and blue hang with a team that had been on a relaxing sabbatical?

The answer turned out to be, no. The tank that had been flashing the warning sign for days as it coasted on fumes finally ran dry.

If the Bulldogs played Saint John in a best-of-seven series in March — even a month ago — they probably win. But in a onegame, winner-take-all showdown under these circumstances, the odds grow much longer.

That hill got even steeper when the hosts jumped out to a quick 2-0 lead. Hamilton cut that in half before the first period was half over. But two more goals in rapid succession for the Sea Dogs was just too much for Hamilton to overcome.

So, disappointing? Yup, for sure. At this moment, you know the players will be feeling it. There’s a better-than-probable likelihood none of them will be back here. This was their chance. That’ll absolutely eat at them.

But context matters, too. In time, though, they may accept that in a Canadian junior hockey world in which only four of the 60 teams that start the year make it to the seasonending tournament and only two of those get to play a game on the final day, this can’t be described as a failure or a whiff. Not close.

Getting here was a remarkable achievement. By the players, by the coaches and by the front office. We may not see another Hamilton team go 35-4 in the second half of a regular season again. Or sweep the first three rounds of the playoffs.

Which is why those involved will certainly feel that disappointment that it ended the way it did. Coming just one win short of the mountaintop. One game shy of what they all wanted.

So Hamilton — the city, not just the hockey team — continues to wait for its national title. Maybe it’ll be the Tiger-Cats that bring it one of these years. Maybe it’ll be McMaster. Maybe it’ll be the Bulldogs. Maybe it’ll be some other organization.

It had just felt like this was the moment.

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2022-06-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-06-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

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