REMEMBERING WHEN: Enjoy your laurels in the now

By Keith Schell

With the Canadian Hockey League (CHL) major junior playoffs upon us, I feel this issue should be addressed. Before the Ontario Hockey League Brampton Battalion moved to North Bay in 2015, I was a fan and avid follower of the team in Brampton, going to as many games as I could through the winter while working the shifts I was on.

As with most CHL teams, there were usually more lean years than good years in the history of a team because teams always had to be rebuilt every three years due to the age limitations of major junior hockey. Entering the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) as an expansion team in 1998, there were many lean years in the beginning as the Brampton Battalion began building their franchise.

Due to the many lean years between the good years, owing to the constant rebuilds every three years in junior hockey as older players on the team began to age out, when the good years occasionally came along, you had to live in the now and seize the accomplishments whenever they happened.

In 2008-09, one of the good years was finally upon the Brampton Battalion. Adding to a solid core, they loaded up on mature and experienced players at the trade deadline to take a run at the 2008-09 OHL championship. It was going to be a last-chance opportunity to win for many of the players the Battalion had acquired that year at the deadline. Since many of the players on that Battalion team did not go on to major professional hockey careers, that year was probably going to be their last shot in their hockey lives to win something significant before they got out of the sport and had to seek careers in the real world. And no doubt, most of the players acquired by the Battalion were aware of this.

But when the Brampton Battalion actually won the 2008-09 OHL Eastern Conference championship, the entire team wouldn’t even touch the trophy when it was brought to centre ice after their final game victory. Owing to prevailing hockey superstition, they thought that if they touched the Bobby Orr Trophy, emblematic of the OHL Eastern Conference championship, it would jinx them for the OHL finals. They refused to celebrate their accomplishment in the moment, even though winning the Eastern Conference and earning the Bobby Orr Trophy was a significant accomplishment at the highest levels of Ontario major junior hockey.

Because the window for success is so limited in junior, I was flabbergasted at the sight of the Eastern Conference championship trophy being abandoned at centre ice as the Battalion started to exit the ice to their dressing room. While I understood their superstitious attitude, as a frustrated former athlete more used to constant losing than occasionally winning, I could not believe that a team would not seize the opportunity to enjoy this rarest of moments—a championship win at the highest level of their sport. They should have picked up the trophy they had just earned and done a victory lap around the ice for themselves and the fans, who were overjoyed by the victory and still cheering in the stands.

Because of silly hockey superstition, the team robbed themselves of the opportunity to properly celebrate their win, which was probably one of the most significant hockey accomplishments in the young sporting lives of many of the players on that team.

However, as the team filed off the ice, I noticed that one of the overage players who had been picked up at the trade deadline, realizing that his time in the OHL was drawing to a close and recognizing the significance of what his team had just accomplished, quietly broke ranks from the rest of the Battalion filing into the dressing room. He went back to centre ice to stand and pose for a picture with the abandoned Eastern Conference trophy still sitting on the table. Although he never actually touched the trophy himself, I think he understood that the future was uncertain, and he had chosen, in that moment, to quietly appreciate his and his team’s achievement in the present.

The Battalion went on to play the Western Conference representative, the Windsor Spitfires, in the OHL finals. The powerhouse Spitfires, ranked number one in the CHL that year and a favourite to win the Memorial Cup right from the beginning of the season, rolled over the Battalion in five games to win the OHL championship and, as expected, went on to win the Memorial Cup.

After being soundly defeated by the Windsor Spitfires in the OHL finals in five games, and with hindsight always being 20-20, I wonder nowadays if any of the other players on that Eastern Conference championship team back then wished they had not taken their accomplishment so lightly in that moment of victory, looking past their conference championship achievement to focus on the bigger prize, the OHL championship that ultimately never materialized. I also wonder if any of the other players on that team wished they had seized the opportunity to do what that one overage player had done in that particular moment—posing with the Eastern Conference championship trophy when it was available at centre ice after the final game.

Living for the future gives people focus and hope for a better tomorrow, but that should not necessarily come at the expense of living in the here and now.

So, the moral of the story is this: Don’t forget to enjoy and appreciate your personal or athletic successes in the present when and if you achieve them, especially at the highest levels. For if you look past your achievement in the now to look to a bigger possible moment down the road, the moment you may be looking to is not guaranteed and may never come.

Success can be fleeting, and sometimes may never come, so if you should ever achieve it, enjoy your laurels in the now whenever you can.