Goes Down Fighting

A defiant moment in a hard-luck Prairie city yesterday. "Winnipeg Arena Goes Down Fighting".. Yeah. Like it would have been any other way.

This event didn't cross Sheena's radar until yesterday afternoon, when it was already too late. (Shout out to my 'Pegger readers... you suck. Why didn't you TELL me. I might have been able to pull some strings.) The completion of the downtown MTS Centre pretty much was the spray-paint on the walls for this venerable institution, but to hear suddenly of its violent demise has put a heavy shadow over Sheena's cold ashtray of a heart today.

When the Jets left, back in 1996, NHL Hockey became dead to me. Ottawa was 'home' that year, but that didn't stop Sheena and her evil minions from plowing through a couple of 2-4s and making long-distance dedications to the 'Save The Jets' campaign. Jim Silver can kiss my ass.

The Jets were one of the few consistently good things back in those formative years. The singular piece of common ground with dear old Dad. The go-to subject of dinner conversation that the whole nuclear family understood. Bobby Hull's retirement. Dale Hawerchuk as the second coming of Christ. Peter Marsh's too-tight leather pants that were questionably appropriate for the kids' fan club meeting on Saturday morning. My first painful crush in Grade 4 on the son of the then-Swedish captain who played my husband in the elementary school play.


The night I was in the stands and Jimmy Mann broke the jaw of the Pittsburgh guy and was charged with assault. And how I followed the court case all year and wrote an essay in Social Studies on the justice system with it as my centrepiece.

Watching the Arena defy the first round of explosives made me proud. Cheering the underdog. The bastards had to bring in the Plan B and draw and quarter the old man to bring it down on schedule. Went down Fighting. Like Mann, and Fergie, and Domi before he became a Leaf.

Sheena, people often ask. What is your most prized possession? Not the first edition of Howe's J.A. Macdonald bio. Not my black pearls. Not my Gucci purse. Not even my secretly stashed four-year-vertical of the Dead Arm Shiraz. Nope. It's an authentic Winnipeg Jets hockey puck. I caught it with my bare hands at the age of 13. I probably saved my father from being blinded or brain damaged that night. He didn't see it coming. Serge Savard smacked it over the boards in that odd year out-of-retirement before he was signed to manage the Habs. I soaked my hand in ice water until the wee hours that night and couldn't write at school the next day.

Went Down Fighting.

RIP.

Another piece of my childhood ripped down and carted away.