The Boys in Blue*

On October 9th, 1995, a rag-tag bunch of boys from the West Island of Montreal took the field at Umea Park in Saskatoon, ready to do battle against the heavily favoured defending champions from Ontario in the final of the boys under-17 national championship. They were outmatched at every position. They were happy just to have made it this far and to have the opportunity to compete for the gold medal. They had already seen their opponents brush aside the rest of the competition and knew that they were next. The objective was to make a good account of themselves and be proud of having made it this far. They were given ninety minutes to prove that they could compete with the very best in the country.

 

 

The season started with a tragedy. Before a ball had even been kicked, the boys assembled in their suits at a funeral hall in Lasalle to mourn the sudden passing of Alan’s mother. Alan had been a part of the first Lakers selection of boys born in 1979 and, at the time, was the only representative from the community of Lasalle. Lasalle was a tough neighbourhood and Alan was a tough kid, so to see him emotionally broken was transformative for the rest of us who had never yet lived through anything so tragic. We stood by him in solidarity and as stoically as we could, but, young as we were, none of us knew what to say or what to do.

Alan was part of our “Black Attack”. He was lightning fast and built like a tank. Naturally left-footed it made sense to place him up front and on the left side with Shaun and Amarkai as part of a starting 4-3-3. Behind them, Danny had a permanent place in our midfield. He could run forever, worked harder than any of us to develop a good touch and good passing, and was the only one among us who truly understood how to control the pace of a game and that not every ball needed to go forward. He knew all of the work that had to be done between the boxes and was by all accounts our only true midfielder. There was a bunch of us who could slot in next to him and who were simultaneously interchangeable with the three starters up front or, in a few cases, with the four at the back. Of the back four, Marco was unchallenged in his position on the left. He was an energetic left-footed wingback who enjoyed contributing to the offence and could swing a good cross into the box. Occasionally, his decision-making was called into question as his desire to get forward could leave us shorthanded at the back, but more often than not the benefits outweighed the risks. Shawn had a permanent spot as one of our two centre backs. He was our captain, our most mature player, and leadership personified. Tall and lanky he wasn’t always beautiful to watch, but he was responsible, always made the right decision, and inspired the rest of us by his sheer presence. In the 4-3-3, there were a few revolving doors at the back with players that could slot in here or there as we experimented with finding what worked best.

Kenrick (Ken) was our head coach. Originally from Trinidad, he had lived in the West Island of Montreal long before any of us had been born and had always been heavily involved in the community as a volunteer. Already in his mid-fifties when he took over as our coach, what he lacked in football[i] ability he made up for in dedication and had been a coach with the West Island Lakers for the better part of a decade with a track record of developing winning teams. Dean was Ken’s assistant but the one we all looked up to. Dean was in his mid-twenties, was still playing for the senior men’s team, and played for the only Lakers team to actually win the national championship a decade earlier. Ever since our team was first formed it was what he always talked about and was the goal that he set for us from day one. He coached us by demonstration because he still had the skills, but Dean’s real talent was his ability to get us into a huddle and light a fire under our asses. We could show up to a game tired and completely apathetic and then one speech from Dean and we would turn into wild-eyed psychopaths ready to crush and remorselessly humiliate our opponents.

I met Amarkai when I was just six years old. Along with Greg, we were part of the first Lakeshore city team that was formed from kids from our community in our age group and we won everything against the other city teams in the West Island region. Danny and Justin joined us the next year and Seb joined us the year after that. By the time we were twelve years old, our Lakeshore team was the most successful club team in the province. Most of the credit for that went to Amarkai who was a force to be reckoned with. He could score at will and I was known as the guy who could put the ball into a place where Amarkai would get the ball and score. Amarkai and I also ended up attending the same high school and there were few of us on the team who had logged as many minutes together over the years as he and I. Our first Lakers team was made up mostly of a contingent of that Lakeshore team and of players from our rivals Dollard-des-Ormeaux – Marco and George among them.

Much was expected of us in our first eligible year, but when our nationals dream came to an abrupt and humiliating end in the semi-final of the under-15 provincials, the team fell apart. Many of us who had had the promise of a second national championship for the club foisted upon our shoulders simply quit and never returned to football at all. The following year, a few of us returned but our coaching was inadequate and stunted our progress and we had to fill out the rest of our team with players from city teams who had a lot of catching up to do to match us for skill. It was a rough year that saw us finish in the middle of the table – a far cry from the team that had won back-to-back league championships.

When the season got underway it got off to a mediocre start. Our league form was decent but we lost an early provincial match. The provincial path was the only way to the nationals and though we were effectively eliminated there were other ways to qualify for the provincial tournament so, though it was a huge and unexpected setback, all was not lost. For the month of July, our ambitions were hanging by a thread. It was midsummer and players would leave with their families on vacation leaving many of us to wonder how committed to our goals we all were. Those of us that stuck around, though, demonstrated our own questionable level of commitment by dabbling in teenaged rebellion when at one point, Danny, George and I, snuck out to the bars in Ste. Anne-de-Bellevue with Danny’s older sister and her friends and got hopelessly drunk. We were only 16 and had never been drunk before and overindulged to the point where poor George was left dry heaving the night away earning him the moniker “Power Puke”. The real miscalculation we made was that the following afternoon we had a match against Jean-Talon who were made up of underaged players and mired at the bottom of the table. We had hoped to feign illness and avoid playing but only 11 of us showed up meaning we had to play. It must have been 35 degrees outside that afternoon in the heat of summer and we were sweating alcohol. I was miserable, not to mention that before that day I had never played right back in my entire life. Despite us having illegal blood alcohol levels, the 11 of us on the field that day were competent enough to get what at the time seemed like a meaningless win.

We were not as competent for other matches that month and real discord erupted in a shock loss to St. Michel where we conceded five goals. Eliminated from the provincial bracket, anything but a league win would mean elimination and an end to the national dream. At that point, it seemed like people were losing interest and another loss could swing things in the wrong direction. We were a talented side that felt like we had always been destined to compete at nationals, but we had not yet learned that destiny is earned and not given.

By August we found our stride. By then, we had converted to a 5-3-2 formation and it just worked. Shawn and Justin were our two most reliable centre backs with Sami cleaning up behind them. Sami was an interesting character. Algerian by birth, he was one of those city players brought in after our U-15 loss and he was an absolute mess of a player who would never have made the team were it not for the fact that he previously played on the city team of our coach that year. His real sport was the 1500 metre run and at that time he was ascending the Canadian ranks and competing at near Olympic levels. He could run forever, and a couple of seasons with decent players around him and he made amazing strides becoming a half-decent footballer and an asset to our team. His parents, though, wanted him to focus on his running which meant that he had to bus in to every game and practice, to every corner of Montreal, on his own. His dedication wasn’t lost on us and something that we could all rally around. Through his running, he also had a sponsorship deal with a nutritional supplement company, called Results, and was able to supply us all with chocolate, banana, and strawberry flavoured protein shakes after games. Marco kept his spot on the left while Greg and I split time on the right. Danny and George were the most likely candidates to occupy the centre of midfield with Danny acting as playmaker and George as destroyer. Fady would play in a free roll just head of them and behind the two strikers. Shaun, Alan, and Amarkai would now split the striking duties and Felice was given some time up front but usually off the bench. I could move inside and substitute for George to give Rami a chance to play out wide on the right and Jay could fill out just about any role whether it was out wide on the right, out on the left for Marco if his wandering ever got us in trouble, or in the middle if Danny ever took over Fady’s spot behind the strikers. Having so many versatile players meant that everyone could get a chance to play and no major sacrifices needed to be made at one position that might threaten our chances of winning a game.

By late August and into early September and wins were beginning to feel automatic. After switching to the 5-3-2 we were still scoring with regularity with the big change now being that no one could score on us. The trifecta of Shawn, Justin, and Sami may not have seemed at first as the key to what turned things around, since keeping goals out was a thankless job, but it made a huge difference in the course of our season just by limiting the number of chances thrown at our goalkeeper, Graziano. Suddenly jobs were freed up all over the pitch especially for Danny who no longer needed to win the ball for us and could concentrate on controlling it and distributing it. The five at the back now meant that both Marco and whoever was on the right could get forward which made us able to better exploit wide spaces and pin opponents back into their own half. The two strikers could now be two separate options for Danny or Fady to find instead of three strikers competing for space and cancelling each other out. Looking back it seems obvious, but it took us months to figure out. The other thing that took us all that time to find was the confidence and belief that we were actually as good as we believed we were, but heading into the final weeks of the season and spirits were high as we won the league and wrestled back our birth in the provincial tournament.

By the time the provincial tournament came around, we lit Québec on fire. No one could touch us and we cruised to victory in the semi-finals and finals winning with a display of such dominance that the outcome just seemed inevitable. We had finally accomplished what we had set out to do four years earlier and would be competing in the National Championships in Saskatoon. It was what we had talked about ever since we first started to kick a ball and after the Nationals there was no other tournament in which to compete for a club player from Canada – that was it. This, win or lose, was going to be as far as we would go. We won everything that Québec could throw at us. We won the league, we won the league cup, and we won the provincials. We even won all of the individual awards too. In an exhibition match in preparation for the Nationals, we played against the league’s all-star team and even won that. It was hard to believe that just a couple of months earlier we had already been eliminated from the provincial tournament and were faring no better than third place in the league and praying for poor results from the teams ahead of us.

Everything about going to the Nationals as a sixteen-year-old was exciting. Some of us had never been on a plane before. The province could only pay for the players and staff to go, so our parents stayed in Québec and we all lodged in hotel rooms together. The girls’ National Championship was taking place in the same city at the same time so we were all in the same hotel complex as the Lakeshore girls whom we had all known and gone to school with in our hometowns. There were enough distractions and as hormone-addled teenagers even we could sense that our coaching staff were worried about keeping us focused. The tournament took place over Thanksgiving weekend with games from Friday to Monday. On the Saturday night there was a party for all of the players. A small contingent of our team made a point of going, walking in so that everyone could see, looked around, and then walked out. We had missed out on this opportunity before, so if we were going to be here we were going to do it right and we weren’t afraid to show that we meant business.

That weekend, something happened to Dean. For four days he wasn’t the same. He seemed distracted but still, he got us out every morning to get the blood going and for stretches and sprints in the lead up to the game of the day. I didn’t know, then, how to articulate what I was sensing from Dean but I understand now that he was nervous. Just nervous. So uncharacteristically nervous. Smooth-talking Dean who even for the most meaningless of games could stir us into a frenzy. Now, every game had something on the line and Dean’s demeanour became what I can only describe as measured.

We opened our National Championship account with a great performance against a strong Alberta side, walking away with a 3-0 win. Our second match was against Newfoundland and teams from the Maritimes never did well so we were expecting to blow past them. They were better than we expected and were no pushovers that would have given many of the teams in Québec a hard time, but we were at the peak of our game and came away with a comfortable 5-0 victory.

We knew that our final group match against British Colombia was going to be our most difficult. Teams from Ontario and BC almost always finished first and second at Canadian National Championships unless they somehow ended up in the same group. Teams from Québec and Alberta almost always expected to compete for third and fourth place, at best. Occasionally a team from Manitoba or Nova Scotia would sneak their way into the medals, but it was rare. The Fraser Valley Force who came to Saskatoon to represent BC didn’t exactly have our sense of discipline and snuck off the night after their first lopsided win against Newfoundland and got drunk. While we were cruising against Newfoundland on day 2, the players from BC were barely able to stand and were pummeled by Alberta by a score of something like 11-3. The way the rules worked, goal difference wasn’t a deciding factor which made the head-to-head matchups more important. Goal difference, thus, stopped at 3 – the margin by which we had beaten Alberta. Despite the lopsided score against BC, Alberta’s win only counted as +3. What it meant was, by virtue of our win against Alberta, all we had to do was not lose by three goals to BC and we would be off to the final as winners of our group. A win by three goals or more by BC would mean a complicated shootout scenario involving us and BC and Alberta.

British Colombia, desperate for those three goals, went for broke and threw everything at us and we were down by two goals after just 30 minutes. Our worst-case scenario was being served up to us on a silver platter. All we had had to do was stay disciplined and defend well and we had failed. Even more shocking was that these were the first goals we had conceded in months. All of us were on edge. Enter Shawn, Sami, Justin and Danny to steady our ship. We started funnelling balls into the middle for our defenders to win and if we could get the ball to Danny he had the control and the patience to slow the game right down. With about ten minutes left to play and BC throwing everything at us, Danny was now getting the ball, turning, and starting to launch counter-attacks. On one of them, Fady found himself with an opportunity at the top of the box and curled one into the top corner. Everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief as we felt the spirit of the BC players break – they were done. One foolish undisciplined act two days earlier and their story was written – they could finish no higher than fifth. We held on and, though the final result was a 1-2 loss, it meant that we were going to play in the final. We were shocked. We had been handed an amazing gift that was beyond even our wildest dreams. For a minute, it felt like it could have all ended there and we would have been content but there were still 90 minutes of a season left to play.

That summer, the under-17 World Cup was held in Ecuador and Canada qualified from the CONCACAF region. Two players from Québec were chosen to represent Canada at the tournament, neither of whom played for us. Fifteen of the 18 players chosen to represent Canada at that tournament were from the province of Ontario and eight of those fifteen Ontario players came from one club – Malvern. When we lost in the provincial semi-finals two years earlier, it was Malvern that cruised to a National Championship victory. They were a team assembled to win and to represent the best of Canadian soccer. The truth was, any Toronto-area team from Oakville to Pickering was going to give us the most difficult game we would play all year. We regularly played in tournaments in Ontario and we usually made a good account of ourselves but were eliminated before we could even compete for a medal. Malvern were a whole other beast and were the side that all of those Ontario teams feared. They were an absolute juggernaut of a team. A lot of us were pimply-faced and still growing, but Malvern were all men and each player already a finely tuned adult athlete. All of them were as quick as Shaun, had endurance like Sami, and understood the game like Danny. They posted double-digit goal tallies in two of their three group matches and now nothing but an upstart little team of National Championship debutants, who couldn’t even win all of their group games, stood in their way of a second consecutive National title. We weren’t so much preparing for the fight of our lives as we were hoping to show that we were at least as good as all of the other Ontario clubs Malvern beat that year.

Our team was conspicuously quiet the next morning. None of us were really laughing or goofing around and it didn’t seem like we were excited to play. The only clear memory I have of anything said that morning that put a smile on my face was Sami, who, because of his running, was on a strict diet, saying, “Today, after we win, I will drink a can of coke”. Regardless of the result, at worst we would be able to say we finished second at the National Championship. Silver medals looked good and no one would think less of us. But we all knew that losing by five or six goals would make that finals appearance seem less meaningful than if we made Malvern really have to work for it. We had come this far and we should at least strive to finish strong.

We used to talk and strategize about how to play against fragile teams. Teams with a lot of Italians from Montreal North and Riviere-des-Prairie were notorious for being fragile in our minds, no matter how talented as footballers they were. As long as you could make a small chip in their armour, they would bitch and complain at each other so that it would widen to a crack and split them apart to the point where they weren’t just playing against us but against themselves as well. Facing Malvern was the only scenario you could engineer where we were fragile because everyone doubted our ability to beat them and conceding an early goal could cement their superiority in our minds and send us spiralling. Humiliation was still a possibility if we crumbled now when the ultimate prize was for the getting. But we were starting at evens and though there would always be that element of self-doubt, we knew that the longer we could weather the storm and stay in it, then anything was possible.

Three games in three days were beginning to take their toll and some of us, especially our best players who had been on the field the whole of the three games were beginning to show some wear and tear. Shaun, along with Alan and Amarkai was the third member of our black attack, and for four years had been our best and most consistent striker probably scoring more goals than any other player in that time. He came out of the backwaters of Pincourt, a small town way west of the island of Montreal, that almost never produced any talent. When we were kids, every time our Lakeshore team lined up against his the tactics were simple: mark Shaun out of the game. We won every time, but Shaun would probably notch one against us anyway. When we finally got to play with him, we made him better and he made all of us better. He had scored against Alberta and against Newfoundland. He had put together an incredible season that had helped us get to the final, but he had run his season. He was desperate to play, but an ankle injury was deemed severe enough that he would play no part. Besides going into the game against the best team in the country, we’d be doing it without our own ace in the hole which was just another psychological mountain for us to overcome.

Dean put us through our paces in the morning to get us as loose as we were going to get. In the lead up to the final, there had been hundreds of games, so many goals scored, hundreds of training sessions, and so many sprints. This was it. Like it or not, after today we were all going into off-season for a while. No more training. No more games. Nothing to do but give everything we had to give for ninety minutes.

We had a team bus that took us from our hotel to the games and during the 30-minute ride, nobody spoke. Dean had a mixtape of songs designed to get our hearts pumping that we had been listening to ever since our first season together and it just blasted over the speakers as the sun, spilling into the bus, crossed noon into the early afternoon of a cool autumn day. We parked and Dean got up and said, “Boys, there’s nothing for me to say that you don’t already know. I’m just going to stand at the door of the bus with my fist out. When you’re ready, you know what to do.” One by one we funnelled out of the bus and I smashed my fist so hard on Dean’s it felt as though I had broken every bone in my hand. I know that all 16 of us did the same which means that Dean, in his last day as our coach, took sixteen truly painful punches to his poor hand.

The moment had come, the opening whistle blew, and suddenly we were in the middle of it. Malvern were skilled and quick, but they were human and the divots in the ground after four days affected them as much as it did us. They launched a few quick attacks but the decisive ball eluded them and the ball would run out for a goal kick or we would block it sending it out for a throw-in. Their execution was sharp, but it wasn’t perfect. It felt strange when early on we connected a series of passes and headed up the field into their half. At some point, it dawned on us that they would have to work to stop us when we had the ball as much as we had to work to stop them when they had it.

A quarter of an hour had been played when Malvern earned a free kick in a good position. We set up our wall as they lined up to take a direct shot at goal. Their player smashed it high toward goal as our wall stood strong bracing for impact and staying large so as not to create any gaps. The ball went screaming into Greg’s face as the wall held firm and he reeled back a few paces. The ball went careening off to the sideline and out of bounds as we all turned to look over at Greg to make sure he was okay. He stayed on his feet and refused to go down. Ken screamed at him to get his attention and Greg just motioned over to the bench with a thumbs up.

About twenty-five minutes in, on one of our attacks, we earned a free kick in their half. Danny and George stood over the ball while the Malvern players got into position at the edge of their box. The ball was resting far enough out that Danny and George talked about whether or not to have a direct shot at goal or try floating it into the box hoping one of our strikers could get on the end of it. Before they could come to a conclusive decision Sami ran in screaming from his sweeper position and struck the ball before anyone could make sense of what was going on. Everyone, including the Malvern players, stood motionless. Only Sami knew what was happening. It wasn’t a great shot but it went skimming along the ground and somehow got passed all of their players. The Malvern goalkeeper just stood there wondering what was happening as the ball dribbled just past the outside of the post. The Malvern players breathed a palpable sigh of relief and we knew we had given them a scare that they weren’t used to. We were never going to win playing them straight up man to man – they were bigger, stronger, faster, and better than we were – the only way we had a chance was to throw the unexpected at them.

We made it to halftime with the score even at 0-0 which was a huge accomplishment but we had been on the back foot for most of it. Despite Malvern controlling much of the game, they hadn’t created any clear cut chances and in truth Sami’s free-kick was the closest either team had come to breaking the deadlock. Our match was the feature of the day, with the medals ceremony set to take place once it was finished, so by the time the second half started all of the competing teams and everybody having anything to do with the tournament packed the grandstand.

By the hour mark, we were still tied and there was a feeling that we could maybe force extra time which would just be more for us to brag about. By this point, we felt like we had avoided humiliation and would walk away proud of how we had played, and every time we even got close to their goal it raised our spirits even more. We weren’t used to being underdogs and the thrill of all the small wins that come from that dynamic buoyed our spirits. We were still being outplayed but we were effectively stymying their chances as well as creating our own. We weren’t matching them punch for punch, but they didn’t have us on the ropes.

Our defence won the ball back in our own half and we got the ball to Danny near the halfway line. Trying to catch them on the counter-attack as we had to do, he sent a speculative ball forward behind their defensive line for Alan to run onto. The defender had a few good steps on Alan to easily track the ball back and the goalkeeper came out to collect the ball. It was an easy take, but at the critical moment the goalkeeper looked up at his defender who simultaneously stopped his run. The ball went skipping past the goalkeeper’s arms and Alan came charging through like a locomotive and found himself alone, in front of a wide-open net, with the ball at his feet.

Now, I need to press pause here. First, to emphasize how time seemed to slow down at that moment and also to explain something about Alan. Our Black Attack was special. After everyone hit puberty and had caught up to Amarkai in terms of size and speed and fitness, he had turned into a very cerebral player and proved that his success as a footballer couldn’t be reduced to his early growth and athleticism. Shaun was slick and an athlete in the truest sense blessed with all of the intangibles and a big heart. But Alan was a badass. We were only sixteen but one got the sense that Alan had his share of tattoos that he was already wearing on the inside and that would make their way to his skin in later life – rites of passage that the rest of us wouldn’t experience for years to come, if at all. He didn’t so much possess any unique wisdom as he had been baptized into a world where his childhood was cut shorter than the rest of us. In a word, his footballing style could be described as reckless. Alan was the one player who was just as likely to fire home a volley from 25 yards out as he was to strike it over the bar with the ball sitting on the goal line and his knack for being caught in an offside position was uncanny. With Alan, it was high risk, high reward – or just failure. So to see him walking in on goal with nothing to stop him, the thought of him attempting to gloriously smash it into the top corner only to watch it sail hopelessly wide crossed our minds. When he coolly and professionally guided the ball with the side of this foot into the middle of the net it was as much of a shock as the fact that it was us, not Malvern, that had broken the deadlock.

If you look at a seismograph of the Saskatoon area from the late afternoon of October 9, 1995, you will see an anomaly because I swear there was an earthquake. The ball trickled into the bottom of the netting and Alan went sprinting off toward hundreds of spectators that now filled the grandstand with his hands covering his face. The ten of us on the field tackled him and went tumbling over one another screaming in celebration. What was happening was not lost on the crowd either who roared to support us and to see the mighty taken down a notch.

But the job was not done and if anything we had poked the beast. This was no fragile team that would yield at the first sign of adversity. On the contrary, for the next thirty minutes, we would be up against a side unaccustomed to being in this position and seeking to swiftly right the ship. We might have been winning, but it was us that was fragile.

With more than a quarter of an hour to go one of the Malvern players collected the ball in midfield. A heavy touch put the ball into a 50-50 situation. George went to intervene and win the ball back but was just beaten to it by the Malvern player who went flying over George and sprawling to the turf. The referee blew his whistle to call a foul and came running over to the spot and handed George a yellow card – his second. A similar foul midway through the first half had earned George his first, and this second meant that his game was done and that we would have to play the remainder of the game down a man. It wasn’t recklessness or a lack of discipline, just a lot of hard work, but George headed off the field as the rest of us prepared to see the game out. Yet another obstacle to overcome and, with George’s dismissal, our tactics went out the window. Though the pressure was on Malvern now as it was they who had to score, we were becoming even more and more fragile. One small chip and the floodgates would open. We would never survive overtime with only ten men, so by hook or by crook, we had to get the job done in the next twenty.

Malvern had all kinds of space to operate with in midfield now and they sent wave after wave at us but could not penetrate into our eighteen-yard box to create a decisive scoring chance. With less than ten minutes to play, Seb was sent on as a substitute to play in the forward position. As a dedicated defenceman, Seb, in his whole playing career, had maybe crossed the halfway line a handful of times, so being thrust into the position of striker was completely new to him. His instructions were simple: if you get the ball, aim for the cornfields. We were effectively finished and out of ideas scrambling to spackle the cracks and keep the ball as far from our net as we could. I can scarcely recall who was left on the field, but I’m sure we were all being held together by duct tape and popsicle sticks reduced to just fragments of a real team. But Shawn, Sami and Justin, never moved and together through the chaos they broke wave after wave of attacks and turned our goal into a fortress.

After another failed Malvern attack went behind our line for a goal kick, Sami slowly grabbed the ball and placed it on the six, took a deep breath, and prepared to strike it as far from our goal as he could. Shawn hobbled to the edge of the box and collapsed down to his haunches. He was done. He looked up at the referee and pleaded, “please, blow the whistle” to which the ref grinned and replied, “You got it, bud!”.

When the final whistle blew I remember feeling very confused. Someone must have missed a call at Destiny HQ because in my mind the match wasn’t supposed to end this way. Realistically, our team was supposed to clap sportingly and say, “good effort!” My mind started rifling through a rolodex of obscure rules that we might have contravened, like fielding an ineligible player, and that might disqualify us. George came sprinting from the rafters and collided into Marco winding him and busting open his lip. Like Amarkai and I, they had played together since they were six years old and had come all this way together. Dean, who had coached them in their Dollard days went right to them with a wide smile. Sami just laid on the turf staring up at the sky – he had earned his can of coke. We got back in our huddle to celebrate and took a lap of honour with our Québec flag before collecting our medals.

If we played that game 99 more times Malvern would beat us every time and maybe even humiliate us in a few of them – but not on that day. That was the only day only we were going to win and we earned it every step of the way. From Graziano in goal, through Danny’s hard-fought ninety minutes in just about every game that season, to Seb playing out of position for the final ten, everyone played their part and it could not have been any other way.

As people flooded in from the grandstand to congratulate us, I remember thinking that we will always have this and that at that time it was the defining moment of my life. And now, twenty-five years on, all I can think about is Alan’s mom. I see young men huddled into a funeral home in their suits all a size too big, dumbfounded and speechless in their effort to comfort their friend, and I understand now that the sadness and joys of life sometimes just are. Had Greg turned his back to the oncoming freekick allowing it to pass through on goal it may have sailed in and we may have broken early. Had Sami’s freekick squeaked in giving Malvern a full 60 minutes to overturn the deficit and, in that urgency, they might have found many paths to the back of our net. Shaun, just healthy enough to play, might have stopped his run behind the defence instead of Alan recklessly charging through and the goalkeeper may have had time to collect that ball that strangely eluded him. The game, like life, had so many opportunities to swing in a different direction than it did and somehow life now only makes sense the way it happened, that a Trinidadian kid from Lasalle, with his childhood behind him, would be calm and steady so that he could give us the defining moment of ours. That is what teammates do for each other.

Football was the defining feature of my childhood with that moment at its apex. I can still recall the smell of the John Abbott College gym where our winter training sessions took place; The sun on the patches of dried sod at Dalbé-Viau where we played our home games; Long road trips down to the States to play in tournaments in the Farmington Valley and Charles River; the light of the sunshine that day at Umea; and the sixteen of us gathered in the huddle with bloodlust in our eyes and Dean, game in and game out, preparing us for the match ahead as though it was our last. And here it was, our last match together.

We arrived at the Montreal airport late that evening to our parents waiting to dowse us in champagne. We were the talk of the town for weeks and the parties continued on into the winter. One of the members of the Lakeshore girls team held a party at her house and all I can remember was Shaun drunk and face down in the grass having an impassioned conversation with the damp soil about how we had triumphed. Winning brought us all together in ways we had never expected, but as a football team, we were finished as though it was a mission accomplished but time to move on. Like Alexander having no more worlds to conquer the team broke up and no one returned the next summer. The year after, our last as eligible ‘79s, a handful of us came back to give it one last kick at the can. We brought some of our friends and the best players from the younger Lakers team with us to fill the gaps left by the players who had moved on from football altogether. We were a great team and won the league one more time but came up short in the provincial tournament losing 0-1 in the semi-final despite being the vastly superior side on the day. That Malvern side didn’t survive that day in Saskatoon either as many of their players went off to Europe or other places to turn pro, or they joined other clubs. In fact, it was that team from Alberta that we had beaten in our opening game that returned two years later and won it all.

One day, about ten years later, I ran into Ken at the airport when I was flying home from the West Coast and we chatted and laughed about those times. Ken passed away in 2009 and Shaun, Marco, Shawn, and I attended his wake to pay our respects and afterward we all sat together and had a beer and reminisced about the time the Boys in Blue overcame the odds and took home the National Championship.

Some of us continued with football and went on to play at university and even competed in other Canadian national championships or in the NCAA. Some moved on from football completely and some of us still play in leagues for players aged 35 and older. Danny went to Europe and competed in a few professional leagues overseas eventually returning to Montreal and becoming the technical director of one of the regions in Québec and has been developing players in the province for 20 years, some of whom have gone on to have amazingly successful careers of their own. Some of the boys now have kids of their own that they cart off to matches and practices hoping the spirit of that National Championship winning side might come full circle one day.

That day in Saskatoon now seems like a lifetime ago and pretty small in the scheme of things. A coach of mine, to soften the blow of a tough defeat, once said: “There are about a billion people in China who really just don’t care.” This would also have been a fact of our National Championship win. Over the years, the bureaucracy of Québec soccer has been rejigged a hundred times and club teams have been realigned in the process to the point where our West Island Lakers team no longer even exists. But for the medals and the memories we took home with us, today there are few relics to commemorate our victory. We were nothing more than a bunch of sons of immigrant parents to a country that in 1995 had no path to professionalism for a sport like football. But for us and our families, the fortunes of this one small group of friends from the West Island of Montreal would have made no far-reaching or lasting impression of great importance. But the facts remain, and the lessons persist, because that group of kids proved that long odds can be overcome, Goliath can be defeated, and that the strength of the team is more important than any individual within it – and that is important always and everywhere.

Thank for you teaching me that, my teammates, my friends, you Boys in Blue.

[i] I use the term “football”, here, referring to the European game. In Canada, the sport is most often referred to as “soccer” but I only use this term when referencing the sport in a particularly Canadian way or in any way that makes the Canadian version of the sport unique. Whenever I make reference to the sport in general, I will use the term “football”.

 

Cover photo from left to right: (back row) Justin, Alan, Amarkai, Shaun, Rami, Seb, George, (middle) Ken, Mimo – team manager, Dave – substitute, Marco, Graziano, Miguel – substitute, Felice, Danny, Dean, (front) Linda – physiotherapist, Sami, Fady, Shawn, Greg, Jason, Me.

 

* On my trips across Canada I always drove along the Number 1 Highway through Regina. There is not a whole lot to see in the prairies and that route between Calgary and Winnipeg is by far the quickest and, having already been to Saskatoon in my teens, for a long time there seemed no reason to go visit. Now, though, it seemed that enough time had passed since that special time that perhaps it was worth travelling through. So I decided not to take the quickest route across the country and instead try to relive some old memories and capture some old feelings.

For a long time, I kept clear memories of those four days in Saskatoon because it was such a transformative event in my life. Twenty years ago, I probably could still have recalled what I ate for breakfast the day of the final, who scored each of the five goals against Newfoundland, or who I roomed with at the tournament. But today so many of those details are foggy or just plain gone. What I’m left with now, besides certain unmistakable facts, are faint impressions and feelings. When I arrived in Saskatoon, now, it felt just like any other Canadian city but felt like one I had never really visited. I didn’t recognize anything and I didn’t know the streets or know how to find things so I was just lost. I had no idea what hotel we stayed at or if it even still existed. I remember on one night we had gone out to a nice restaurant but there was no way I was going to be able to dig up the facts as to which one it was. The only way I was going to be able to rekindle those memories was if I was able to get to the ground where it all happened. But where and how was I going to be able to track down that piece of information?

A few years ago I had all of my old photos digitized and all I had was a single photo from that day of us celebrating. Clearly visible in the photo is a fence with some ivy growing on it and homes in the distance. On my second day in Saskatoon, I went down to the tourist information office to try to get information hoping that they might have old records or ways to track down that kind of information. I told my whole story about why finding this ground was so important to me and showed them the photo hoping that it might help, but the girl who first started to help me hadn’t even been born when the photo was taken.

Calls were made into Saskatchewan’s provincial soccer offices hoping that they might be able to dig up some old information. After various internet searches, we uncovered a subscription-based website that alleged to contain articles of the local newspaper, The Star Phoenix, that contained words from our search terms and aligned with the dates. I went over to the public library next door hoping that they might have old microfiche of those old articles but because of the coronavirus pandemic, no one was actually allowed into the library. When I returned to the tourist office to explain how I was barred from entering the library, and hoping to find out more ways that I might be able to track down those old articles, the young lady said that she was glad that I had returned. She handed me printouts of three articles from the newspaper from those dates with details about those National Championships and where they were played.

“Wait a second, how did you get these?” I asked.

“I loved your story,” she said, “so I just subscribed to that website.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” she replied. “I had to know for myself.”

The area around Umea Park had grown significantly over the last 25 years. There’s a ring road called the Highway 16 that encircles the old Saskatoon and Umea Park is located beyond that perimeter and back in 1995 there was nothing but a few homes and mostly farm fields, but now there is a whole community. Umea Park has grown as well and is now centred around the Henk Ruys Soccer Centre and indoor training facility. There is a community centre and tennis courts and, of course, the two pitches side-by-side just as they were all of those years ago. The fence is still there and it was unmistakable that this was the pitch where defeated Malvern.

On the morning before I continued my journey eastward, I headed out to the ground to walk the field where it all happened. I was alone and the grass was soft and cool and covered in dew. The morning light, through some sparse clouds, caught the field in just the right way and I was transported back to that time and to those old feelings of charging into the huddle after it was all over and we had won and knowing how important it was and how hard we had all worked to turn that dream into reality.

Over the years, the significance of those four days, and that season, began to wane when compared to everything I had lived through since. There had been so many other successes and failures and life lessons that those times had become just one small part of a whole life lived. It was not until I revisited the ground and all of those memories began to flood back into my consciousness that they could manifest new meaning and significance from a new perspective. Such is the strength of memories that are central to our story that they never lose their significance only that that significance transforms and becomes more profound with time.