Adam Gagnon/CFL.ca
Mike Filer’s work was done for the night but he couldn’t stop organizing.
The long-serving Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ centre stood in his team’s locker room wrapped in a towel, his long, dark locks soaking wet, trying to bring his teammates in. In his mini-huddle stood four or five similarly-dressed teammates, all of them with a can of beer in hand.
Rattling off lines from the movie Fubar (shoutout to southern Alberta), Filer and his crew were about to shotgun a beer when their coach, June Jones walked by.
That’s when Filer put two words together and capped a scene that over the last few weeks seemed impossible to think of.
“Shotgun, coach?” he asked.
Jones politely (read: slightly thrown off, chuckling and walking away) declined, the beers were howled at, punctured and consumed and the Ticats dove into celebrating the night that could have changed their season.
Up 10-0 in the first quarter, booed off the field down 24-10 at halftime and thanks to Lirim Hajrullahu’s late field goal, 25-24 winners on Thursday night, the Tiger-Cats stunned the Edmonton Eskimos.
The Ticats’ late-game struggles had plagued them all season and were a key part of their 3-5 record. Jeremiah Masoli had two game-winning drives in each of the last two seasons for Hamilton but didn’t have any this season, his first full year as the Ticats’ starting QB.
Masoli — 27 of 44 passing, 419 yards, two touchdowns and one interception — got his team into the end zone late against Edmonton, then marched his team up to Edmonton’s 22-yard line to set up Hajrullahu’s game-winner.
There’s a big difference between knowing you can do something and actually doing it. The Ticats felt that at home, in front of 23,281 fans at Tim Horton’s Field. From Jones to Masoli, to Hajrullahu and throughout the room, the magnitude of this win resonated.
“Put it this way,” said Ticats receiver Luke Tasker, whose 156 yards and a touchdown were a game-high.
“When we win the Grey Cup we’re going to look back at this game as an important part of our season. I think this game will be, it’s going to be defining for the way we go forward.”
As Jones settled in at the podium for his post-game press conference, the first words out of his mouth were a simple, “Wow.”
“There’s a culture in the locker room that won the game. We hung together, we overcame a whole bunch of adversity. It wasn’t one guy. It was the whole team.
“Jeremiah did a lot of good things, did some things he’d like to re-do. But it was definitely a team effort. “
There were plenty of moments that could have sunk the Ticats. Masoli opened the night with an interception to J.C. Sherritt before he got his team up 10-0. At two different points in the game, he threw threw the ball from his end zone and had it hit the uprights in front of him.
Luke Tasker led all receivers with 156 yards on the night (Adam Gagnon/CFL.ca)
“Man, how about that? Both guys were open too,” Jones said.
“I know Jeremiah wasn’t thinking about it. I know he’s thinking about the touchdown that he would have thrown if he hadn’t hit the goalpost.”
Masoli was more direct about what had the potential to be a pair of deflating moments, the second time especially.
“I don’t even want to talk about it, man. I’m ready to go out there and cut the field goal posts down,” he said.
“It’s tough when you’ve got some outbreaking routes from that far hash and you’re on the five-yard line. I think the second one, if I threw it any other way it wouldn’t have hit Speedy (Banks) or it would have gone to a defender.
“Hopefully I can talk to coach and just, let’s call something else so I don’t have to throw to the field there. But that’s on me too. Just another thing you can learn from.”
The win bumps the Ticats up to 4-5, and into second place in the East after Toronto’s loss to Montreal on Friday, with Mark’s Labour Day in Hamilton and the re-match the week after looming.
The Ticats will go into Labour Day brimming with confidence and will try to beef up their roster. Receiver Chris Williams suffered what looked to be a possible season-ending injury. Asked if that would increase the team’s interest in free-agent Duron Carter, he coolly said that he’d just been thinking the same thing in the locker room.
Before the Ticats and Argos do battle on Labour Day, they’ll slug it out for the services of one of the most naturally talented players in the league.
