As an Edmontonian in my early 30’s, I didn’t watch the great Oiler teams of the 80’s. I was a baby when they were celebrating their first Cup. I was still learning how to read when they won their last one. I grew up with little more than a faint memory of the team being any good and certainly no specific ones of Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier dominating the league as Oilers.
What did happen is that I grew up with the stories of the Boys on the Bus. They weren’t my stories though. They belonged to my father, my aunts and uncles, and friends of the family. They belonged to a generation before me. I grew up an Oiler fan with the pirated memories of other people painting the history of my team.
MY Oiler team didn’t have Mess and Wayne. It didn’t have Jarri or Paul. It DID have Kelly Buchberger, but he was awful and got beat up a lot. My Oiler team had Ryan Smyth and Doug Weight. It had Mike Grier and Ales Hemsky. My Oiler team had Igor Ulanov and Janne Niinimaa. If that club had anything it was barely a handful of talent and buckets of work ethic.
Events like the Heritage Classic provide the opportunity to blend my Oiler team with the team of my father. Though the game wont start this way, I might get to see Ryan Smyth play on Gretzky’s wing at some point. I’ll be watching Dale Hawerchuk on the other side. He’s a player who was so great in the memories of my parents’ generation but was a shadow of that by the time I was 10 years old. I could see him passing the puck off to Teemu Selanne (who can probably still play in the NHL if he just wanted to).
I’m sure I’m not alone among Oiler fans of a certain age where the accomplishments of a good number Alumni have a lot more to do with driving the team into the ditch than it does lifting it to the heights of NHL supremacy. MacTavish, Buchberger, Lowe, Semenko, and Simpson have something of a monopoly on the failures of the franchise of my generation. There has been a lot more bad than good over the last decade and the Boys on the Bus fell asleep at the wheel. It’s nice to give them a chance to make a good memory for me, if only for one day.
Edmonton has been harkening back to the good ol’ days pretty much since they stopped being good in 1992. In recent memory they’ve been flip-flopping on the focus put on those teams from the 80’s, but right now it’s full steam ahead on their worship. Membership into that club provides jobs for life and access to the altar at the cult of the past that has been cultivated here. You’ll recall Dallas Eakins taking down pictures in the locker-room of those Oiler greats in an attempt to give the team back to the current generation. That lasted about as long as a Yakupov stint in the top 6.
Today’s game is all about fun and nostalgia. And for even just slightly older fans they will get to see familiar faces and numbers in Oiler silks again. For me, this game gives me an opportunity to fill in the stories I was told about greatness and hockey in Edmonton with something real. It’s no substitute for having seen these old men in their prime, but it’s all I’ll ever get.
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