Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 70: the pass, the goal, the pic


For days lately, I have resembled nothing out in the world more closely than Los Angeles Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick lying face down after McDavid tore through his defence and tested positive for greatness in Game 7. Covid has brought me down. 


Here is Three Things podcast, episode 70, a triptych tribute to that goal.


                                           

1. The pass 


When Shell built a filling station in the field behind our house in the northeast end in the 1970s they also put up a big wooden fence to keep us alley kids from cutting through a grassy patch on our way north to Londonderry Mall and the wilds of Dickensfield. That fence was our introduction to the attempted corporate control of our free movements. We resisted. For years we knocked one plank out of the fence every time it was nailed back into formation. 


                       


I love passes—those boy-made or natural gaps between obstacles, those paths through or over, those ways up and out. We have some stunning passes in this part of the province. Sunwapta and Bow are two of the beauties between Jasper and Banff in the Canadian Rockies.


                    


The scenic, icy Gretzky-Kurri Pass was a way though Long Island on the way to the promised land in Edmonton in the 1980s. In this vein, the Yamamoto-McDavid Pass delivered a stunning view last week. Kailer Yamamoto carried the puck toward the centre line with Connor McDavid flying furiously down the left wing boards. It was a 2-on-2 rush. Two Oilers against two of the Kings men. The advantage is always with the defence in that situation. But that pass found a way through the always. Yamamoto flicked the puck gently across the centre line, landing it where it could have been easily intercepted by the Kings defender, if he hadn’t turned his back to the play to vainly try to keep up to the Oilers captain, who, as the puck landed, cut back toward to the centre of the ice to catch it at full speed, stay onside and take it in alone on a breakaway. It was a beautiful pass to the C. 




2. The goal


The goal itself reduced the Kings players to extras in a movie scene. The defenceman undone by McDavid’s sharp cut to the puck was humiliated a second later by hooking but failing to slow #97’s path to the net and then again humiliated a second after that as he gave up trying to tame McDavid, preferring instead to complain to the referee about a delayed penalty. Or he was appealing to Newton for mercy from the first law of motion. Either way, this defenceman chose to stop being embarrassed by stopping trying to stop McDavid and, instead, gliding to a stop behind the net where he could join the 18,000 fans in the building watch the inevitable unfold. That meant that a  back-checking King forward was the only one to face McDavid as he wheeled behind the net and back out to the slot after collecting his own rebound on a wraparound shot. McDavid neatly put the puck through this defender’s legs, banked it off his skate blade, collected it with own skate with a kick to his stick and ended the pinball wizardry by backhanding the puck over the Kings goaltender. Tilt! 


It was, says Three Things hockey correspondent David Blatt of Tulsa, Oklahoma, “one of the most remarkable goals I’ve ever seen. Pure force of will by McDavid.” Amen.


                                                       Jeff McIntosh, The Canadian Press

3. The pic 


The aftermath of it all was captured in a photograph by Jeff McIntosh of The Canadian Press. It’s a sculpture as much as a photograph. The Kings goaltender is prostrate, undone, undressed, his head buried in his blocker and catching glove while he awaits absolution. An L.A. defender is standing there frozen, helpless, forever. The dancing fans behind the glass behind the net are euphoric. They could be figures in their natural habitat preserved in a diorama at the Royal Alberta Museum. Not visible in the wreckage is the puck. 



I remember hanging around the photo desk at the Edmonton Sun on game nights in the 1990s, listening to Perry Mah talk about hockey photography. You had to see the puck in the net, he would say. It’s a kind of punctuation mark, like a period to close a sentence. Now, this photo of McDavid after the goal doesn’t have the puck. It has McDavid himself, just off centre in the frame, still galloping, this time coming at you in celebration, his stick gripped in one hand like an exclamation mark in a joust.

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