Spits Win Cup

The Windsor Spitfires, my adopted city's OHL team are the 2009 Memorial Cup champions. It was a tough road and at times it didn't seem to be in the cards for the Spits. They lost their first two games of the tournament, to the Rimouski Oceanic 3-2 in overtime and to the Drummondville Voltirgeurs 5-4, respectively.

This shouldn't have been. The Spitfires were the best team in the country all season long and although they were facing Canada's other two champions from the WHL (Kelowna Rockets) and QMJHL (Voltigeurs) plus the automatically qualifying host team (Rimouski)
They should have won their first two out of three games and received a bye into the championship final.

In fact it took them to win the final game of the round-robin and earn a birth into the tie-breaker qualifier game to even have a shot at the semi-final game. But reality settled in, as well as the Spits themselves and all ended up well. They beat the host Oceanic in the tie-breaker, 6-4 thanks to Dale Mitchell's natural hat trick.

So now the Spits were in the tournament semi-final against the Voltigeurs. The Spitfires blew an early 2-0 lead, but won 3-2 in overtime thanks to Adam Henrique's goal of destiny, as I'd like to think of it. This made the Spits omly the second team ever to play in the Memorial Cup final after playing in the tie-breaker game.

In the championship final, the Spitfires cruised to a 4-1 win after scoring on their first three shots. This was the Spitfires first Memorial Cup championship and well-earned one after a thrilling 2009 season.

The last time the Spitfires were in the Memorial Cup tournament was in 1988 when they swept every round of the OHL playoffs, as well as the round-robin portion of the Memorial Cup, only to lose 7-6 in the championship game to the Medicine Hat Tigers. In other words they lost just one game in the entire playoffs, including the Memorial Cup tournament and still had to go home as finalists and not champions. If you ask me, they should have simply been handed the cup after the round-robin concluded that year. The better team most definitely did not win.

But, that has been rectified (21 years later) and the Windsor Spitfires are OHL and Memorial Cup champions and this time the better team did win. It was scary at first, but the job got done.
Way to go Spits!

The entire breakdown of the OHL, WHL and QMJHL playoff brackets, the memorial Cup tourny as well as game results can be found here.

Spits One Win Away from National Championship

After dispensing the Drummondville Voltigeurs 3-2 in overtime in the tie-breaker game (after dropping their first two games of the tournament) thanks to Adam Henrique's overtime goal in the Memorial Cup Semi Final game, the Windsor Spitfires are just one win away from clinching the Memorial Cup. Canada's junior hockey Holy Grail. The game takes place tomorrow, Sunday, May 24.

Just one more win. Will the ghosts of 1988 finally be excorcised? A whole city is hoping that's the case.