10/27/2007 11:15:06 PM

A Crying Shame

Everyone has options when a moment of truth comes about – one can either define the moment, or the moment can define you. This is true of every one of us with no exceptions, and many of us had opportunities to define the moment last night from top to bottom. Coaches and players, fans and officials, all in some way had a hand in last night’s result. For what it’s worth, Sean Fleming defined his moments of truth time and time again in his 16 year tenure with the Eskimos…and last night was no exception.
I wouldn’t be being honest with myself if I didn’t say that I thought it shameful the way that his closing moment in the spotlight as a professional football player, was taken from him last night. Sadly, I can’t really say that I’m as shocked as most people who witnessed that game probably are. 7 years in the league have jaded me it seems, as I’m used to getting hoodwinked and bamboozled. I’ve come to expect the banana in the tail pipe á la Wile E. Coyote. Needless to say I lost sleep over it for sure, but not so much because of the general sentiment of violation that lingered throughout the city last night. I lost sleep because we once again had opportunities to close a team out, and came up short from inside the 5 yard line twice. I lost sleep because I laid out for the game tying ball in overtime in the end zone and came up short. I lost sleep because I went back over each play in my mind that I had an opportunity to make this season, and the ones that I wasn’t able to make stuck out like my own sore thumb.
This bad after taste that is left in each one of our mouths after such a result last night against Saskatchewan’s reserves should be familiar to us by now. I’ve felt it on 9 separate occasions this year that I can think of off the top of my head, and I won’t let myself forget any of them. In each of those 9 games we had opportunities to close a team out and weren’t able to capitalize on them, and regardless of what anyone may say about Sean’s final kick and the situation surrounding it – it never should have come to that. If you can’t find a way to score with three chances from the one yard line, you probably don’t deserve to be in the playoffs. Say what you will about me, but that’s how I feel. And that’s happened to us far too many times this year for us to consider ourselves a good team. Granted, there are some teams that will be playing in the post-season that don’t necessarily qualify as good teams either in my opinion, but that’s not at all for me to say. The fact that we’ve been eliminated from post-season contention puts me on gag order until training camp starts up in 2008 because all of those teams did what mine could not – they found a way to win enough games to get to the ones the mattered, and I wish them all luck going forward.
To me, as tragic as the result of Sean’s final kick was – and it was certainly tragic, the real catastrophe is our total body of work as a team. It took us an entire season to believe in one another, a whole 18 weeks for us to be able to look at each other and know that the man beside us was giving all that he had. In spite of that, we still managed to have a legitimate chance to have won another 9 games. I sit and think about how much actually went wrong for us this season: injuries, a rash of new players thrust into starting roles, new schemes, post-game ref apologies, arbitrations, special teams woes, red zone inefficiencies, stalling drives, defensive struggles, etc. Yet we still had 9 games that came down to the one drive, or one stop. And now the result of us having not been able to win even 1 of those 9 games, or get that one drive, that one stop, we will never have this same team together again and many of our futures are in doubt. The future of this team is as much out of our hands as players, as the result of Sean’s perfect last kick was out of our hands last night. Of course there is plenty of blame to pass around, just depends on what type of person you are. I’m that type that looks within before anywhere else. I learned early on in my career that it’s useless to dwell on that which you have no control over, and I hold true to that. That being said, it’s a damn shame that the game turned out the way it did.
Montreal just beat Calgary, so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – then again, we’ll never know.
Damn shame. ©

KP8