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No inn with a rooom
?A week from tomorrow, Uxbridge’s team, the Junior C Bruins, begins its quest for another Central Division championship. It will be hard to top last year, when the Bruins won their two playoff rounds handily, moving on to play Amherstview in the Schmalz Cup.
But there was room for improvement this season, and the Bruins certainly showed where. Last year they finished the regular season only four points ahead of their biggest rivals, the Port Perry Mojacks, with 55 points. The Mojacks finished second again this year (though barely) with 45 points, but this year they were a whopping 19 points behind the Bruins, who lost only nine games all season to amass 64 points. Seems to us, if you finish that far ahead of the pack, you should get some sort of meaningful reward, like an automatic victory in each round of the playoffs. We can dream, can’t we?
Similarly, there should be a penalty if you’re way behind in last place. As far as the Bruins were on top of the division, that’s how far the last-place club, the Lakefield Chiefs, were behind everybody else - 19 points. The middle three of the five teams, meanwhile, were only separated by two points: Port Perry with 45, Little Britain with 44 and Georgina with 43. Now Georgina, only one game out of second, has to square off with the woeful Chiefs to see who plays Uxbridge. It’s a mini-series, only three games, and any team can win over that span. Seems unfair to the Ice to have to go through that, but to use a current phrase, “sucks to be them”.
On the other hand, the Ice was the team that gave the Bruins the most trouble over the season, so it would be ever so nice if the Chiefs could eliminate them for us, as they did the Mojacks last year. The other side of the coin is that Keswick is a lot closer for Uxbridge fans to travel to support the Bruins. So for the sake of our readers, who of course are all Bruins fans, we are officially rooting for the Ice in the preliminary round. We’ll pretend it’s all about justice.
At any rate, having finished so far above the rest of the Junior C Central crowd, it would have to rate as a major disappointment if the Bruins didn’t win their two divisional playoff rounds and move on, like last year, to the Schmalz Cup. Then the trip was a surprise, a gift considering the team’s mid-season coaching change. But the thrill of the late-season surge which saw them take first place and then the championship, was only slightly dampened when they lost 4-2 in games to the high-scoring Amherstview Jets in the Schmalz quarter-finals.
This season, the Bruins will be expecting to go higher than that, playing well into April. But to achieve that goal, they’ll need to buckle down and focus on the task at hand, defeating a pair of teams who would love nothing better than to knock off a prohibitive favourite, as the Bruins have become.
The other thing the Bruins will need is the passion of their fans. We hope you’ll respond to their fabulous regular season by showing up in droves and selling out every single home playoff game. We hope you’ll also car pool and head to Keswick or Port Perry or wherever the trail takes you, to back our boys. They’ve done us proud this year, and they deserve a rabidly cheering pro-Bruin mob wherever they go. Thanks for an amazing season, gentlemen, now take us into spring!
