Mike Farwell

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to Kitchener Rangers games. My fanaticism would have been at its peak when the likes of Brian Bellows, Al MacInnis, Paul Coffey and Scott Stevens were skating on Auditorium ice, though the significance of that was lost entirely on me at the time. I was just a kid watching my hockey heroes.

It occurs to me that things haven’t changed all that much. Though calling hockey players half my age my “heroes” might be a bit of a stretch, I certainly admire the season the Kitchener Rangers just had. The thing is, it didn’t dawn on me until after the fact just how special this season has really been. I suspect it’s got something to do with being so close to the team, covering it as I do for Rogers Television. This past season, winning just became sort of routine. And it wasn’t until the day after that record-setting 53rd win that it really occurred to me that I had watched history unfold over the past six months. The 53 wins put up by this year’s edition of the Kitchener Rangers surpasses the 52 victories earned by those teams that featured the likes of Bellows, MacInnis, Coffey, Stevens et al. The significance this time is not lost on me, and I’m proud to have been as closely asssociated with the team as I have been this season. In fact, every one of you as fans should be equally proud. More than six thousand of you packed the Grand Ol’ Barn in Kitchener every Friday night. We all had a first-hand account of a historical season.

I couldn’t help but reflect on this last night as we watched the Rangers exorcise a ghost of playoffs past by sweeping aside the Plymouth Whalers — the team that eliminated Kitchener last year.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the Rangers also swept their first round series last season.