This year's Grey Cup preparations and celebrations reminds us once again how fortunate we are to be able to call Saskatchewan our home province and to claim the Canadian Football League as ours.
The Grey Cup and all that goes with it, including the run-up to the big event, is purely Canadian and always has been, with the exception of a couple of years of ill-advised exploratory movements in the United States that gained the CFL a few fans but did little to enhance the product.
The Stanley Cup is also a Canadian-based prize, but American interests have pretty well absconded with this unique trophy and all its symbolic Canadian roots.
The Grey Cup, however, is exclusively ours.
Regina and the province put on a great show. Nothing was over the top. The game featured a strong mixture of Canadian and American football players joining together to play for a national title that brings in a few additional dollars for the players, but so much more for the host province and city, not only in terms of dollars but also in exposure and goodwill.
We watched the fun unfold on television, and we enjoyed what we saw and heard. We didn't get a classic football game this time around, but we got a huge dose of entertainment.
We watched extremely talented footballers going at it with only modest paycheques waiting for them at the end. It was mostly for prestige and pride and that coveted cup that even the U.S. honed players learn to appreciate as they embrace the much more exciting style of football that is played in Canada.
This is the CFL, the little league that could. This is the modest league that will expand to just nine teams next year with the re-admission of Ottawa. It bodes well for the future.
We viewed and heard a good hard-edged Canadian rock group take to a small stage to rock us on at halftime. We viewed the same tired television commercials we've seen all year, and somehow appreciated the fact that the networks don't attempt to pillage the advertisers with $84 million per second commercials like they do on Super Bowl extravaganzas that only the elite corporate suits can afford to attend in person, along with about 2,000 actual fans.
In Regina, on Sunday, we saw 45,000 genuine lunch-bucket fans enjoying the hell out of each other on a cool, breezy day. They hugged, argued and partied together the whole week leading up to the Sunday finale. They paid homage to the game and to the province and to one another. We welcomed the interlopers into our midst, fed them, drank with them, made them our friends (for the most part), and sent them back home with the promise to get together and do it again next November in another Canadian city.
What can be better than that?
