Four members of the Okotoks Bisons skating in their last Junior hockey games in Alberta weren’t quite ready for the curtain to be lowered on their careers.
Over-agers Chase Fallis, Ty Fehr, Jeremy Smith and Zach Baba extended their Junior hockey glory for another two weeks after capturing the provincial championships Sunday in Wainwright, earning a berth into the Western Canadian championships.
Okotoks dispatched the Sherwood Park Knights 8-4 in the provincial final, its second win in three days over the Edmonton-area team.
“I was sitting in the dressing room by myself, tying my skates and I was shedding some tears,” said Baba, a 21-year-old Okotokian. “It kind of hit me that this could have been our last game and we used that emotion to help us win.”
“I guess they were happy tears looking back on the past 17 years of hockey.”
Through six years of Junior hockey, with destinations ranging from Golden and Fernie in Jr. B and Nipawin and Drumheller in Jr. A, the alternate captain has seen it all in Western Canada.
Now he finally has his provincial memento.
“I played in Fernie and we hosted provincials and we got silver then and the silver (in Okotoks) last year,” Baba said. “It’s my sixth year in Junior and I needed this (gold medal) big time.”
As the longest serving Bison, fourth-year pivot and second year captain Chase Fallis couldn’t help but get caught up it the magnitude of the gold medal tilt.
“Before the game some of the 21-year-old’s were getting teared up knowing that this could be our last game,” Fallis said. “We just knew we had to come out hard. We’d beat this team once already and knew that we could do it again.”
The Bisons captain, who produced 65 goals and 155 points in 138 games from 2009-13 in Okotoks, said he’s looking forward to the brief extension to his on-ice experience at the Keystone Cup, April 18-21 in St. Malo, Manitoba.
“Now we have five, six, more games in Westerns,” Fallis said. “I’m so excited. It will be good to play teams from Manitoba, B.C. And it will be a fun trip with the boys going to Manitoba, 15 hours away.”
Twenty-one year-old Ty Fehr said the Bisons learned how to win the clinching provincial game after coming agonizingly close to drinking from the Russ Barnes Trophy last year in Okotoks.
“We knew we weren’t going to have that feeling again and it just motivated us,” Fehr said. “We weren’t going to lose today, we weren’t going to lose.”
“The last few teams we’ve had were really close, but this year we were just as close,” said Fehr, a Bison from 2010-13. “Everyone wants it, every single person wants it and I can’t credit the guys enough.”
Power forward Jeremy Smith has been a dominant force on offence since joining Okotoks in 2010-11 after a promising rookie campaign with the Strathmore Wheat Kings.
Smith said getting the first goal against Sherwood Park, through Eddie Tracy, went a long way to calming the considerable nervous energy the overage Bisons were emitting on the bench.
“With the nerves we needed to have a good shift, once we do that the nerves go away,” Smith said. “And getting that first goal is huge, because if you’re down you kind of panic a bit. Then we got the momentum right away and then the confidence sets in.”
The Chestermere native was acutely aware his final 60 minutes of Junior hockey could have taken place at the Wainwright Multiplex on Sunday.
“That was scary. I was sitting there sitting by myself thinking about that prepping for the game,” Smith said. “We just wanted to empty the tanks and like we said all weekend ‘put the work boots on and go to work.”
“Now we’ve got more hockey to play.”
