 |
Richie Hall retreated to the Eskimos dressing room in tears shortly after speaking to reporters in Regina on Saturday.
He'd just finished taking questions about Edmonton climbing out of a huge hole to battle back and beat his old Roughriders in his first game back to the place where he played and coached for 20 years and where they were honouring his 1989 Grey Cup champion Saskatchewan squad.
It was assumed the tears were produced by the past.
And to some extent, said the new Eskimos head coach, they were.
"It was very emotional, coming back there and being accepted the way I was. I was proud and thankful," Hall said yesterday.
But you had to wonder if those tears had more to do with the future than the past as he walked back into the dressing room of the team that battled back from 0-22 to get the win in the park where they'd only won once in the last 10 tries.
"Oh yeah," admitted Hall after practice yesterday. "More for the future. And the present."
CHANGE
Saturday was not only the kind of game that can change a season. It was also the kind that can change a coaching career.
Consider where the Eskimos were when Saskatchewan scored to make it 22-0.
At that moment, they'd been outscored 112-38 in just over nine quarters -- 120-38 if you go back to the last eight minutes of the season-opener against Winnipeg.
"I know it was a lot versus a little," Hall said.
"For them to be underground and rise to the occasion ... I was just so happy for them," the coach said of his players.
"I like the way this outcome was because, like I told the guys, this could be one of those defining moments of our football season.
"It's a good starting point. Things couldn't get any worse. You stink up the joint two weeks in a row, we fall behind by 20-something points but they remained confident."
With the 4-0 Alouettes here on Thursday night -- coming off a 50-16 defeat of the Eskimos in Montreal -- and three of four games against the defending Grey Cup champion Calgary Stampeders coming up in the stretch through Labour Day, you could contemplate a 3-8 or 2-9 team and another airlift of NFL cuts.
Teams that have made changes to half their starting lineup and get out of the gate like that have been known to keep unravelling for the entire season -- and several seasons to follow.
See Tiger-Cats, Hamilton.
First-year coaches who get off to that kind of a trip have been known to be fired by Labour Day.
See Kettela, Pete.
Lose that game in Saskatchewan, and the fans would be wanting Danny Maciocia fired as GM and might even have been starting to put CEO Rick LeLacheur in their sights.
Football is a sport of defining moments and defining games.
I'll always wonder what might have been if Rick Campbell had his defence correctly aligned and Milt Stegall hadn't scored that game-winning 100-yard touchdown with no time left to give Winnipeg a 25-22 win here on July 20, 2006.
I wonder if that team wouldn't have come unglued the way it did after that game. If they'd won, that defending Grey Cup championship team would have been 3-2 to start the season.
SPIN-CYCLE
That one play in that one game sent that team into a spin-cycle that resulted in a 7-11 season to end a North American pro sports record of 34 consecutive seasons in the playoffs.
You have to wonder if Calvin McCarty's 37-yard touchdown run on Saturday to stop the bleeding, to get Ricky Ray out of his early-season funk and help the team to be able to see itself as being of some substance, might not have the same effect as the Stegall play did in the other direction.
"It was a great character win, a great character performance for us," said Hall. "But it depends on what happens from here on in."
Of course, the Eskimos could still get massacred again by Montreal and dragged through the dirt in those three games against Calgary.
One game does not make a season in football -- or any other sport.
But Saturday's win had all the earmarks of a seasonchanger.