MONTREAL — The Montreal Alouettes should certainly know their way around Grey Cup week.
They are headed to their fifth Canadian Football League championship game in seven years after a bumpy 33-24 win yesterday over the Toronto Argonauts in the fifth East Division final between the teams in five years.
Yesterday's script followed that of the Als' regular season. Montreal started strong, faltered midway through the game, but ended on a high note when Damon Duval's 44-yard field goal secured the win with 51 seconds remaining.
"It feels great, but I want to feel a whole lot better a week from now," Montreal quarterback Anthony Calvillo said. "I'm tired of losing there and I'm going to stress that. We've been so many times it shouldn't bother us any more."
Montreal Alouettes running back Robert Edwards celebrates after scoring a touchdown against the Toronto Argonauts. (Ryan Remiorz/CP)
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While Calvillo was celebrating, there was a sombre mood around Argos quarterback Damon Allen, who was pulled from a playoff game for the second week in a row.
Allen was good on eight of 11 passes for 57 yards during the first half, but head coach Michael Clemons opted to stick with him to start the second half rather than turn to backup Michael Bishop.
"If you pull your starting quarterback at that point, you get everybody rustled and you create too great a sense of urgency," Clemons said. "The proper thing is to let him come back, but if he doesn't score on that next series, you take him out."
That proved to be a questionable decision as Allen's first pass of the second half wound up in the hands of Montreal's Mark Estelle, who ran it back for a touchdown to make the score 23-3.
Allen played one more series. Then he watched the rest of the game with his hands on his hips, barely speaking to anyone. With such a poor stretch of games to finish the season, it's conceivable the 43-year-old legend, who this season became professional football's career leader in passing yardage, may have played his final game.
"When you're taken out of a ball game, your role changes," Allen said. "If I do get any upset about it, it's that I'm competitive. Every individual who plays football has a desire to be on the field.
"The questions I have to ask myself is: can I still play the game, do I still have the passion to play?" Allen said. "I'm a competitive person and I still feel I can win a championship. That's where I am mentally. And physically, I feel I can play the game."
While Allen was struggling, the Als turned to the rushing of Robert Edwards, who carried 24 times for 137 yards, often moving the pile after three or four tacklers had arrived. Calvillo then picked his spots to go deep, racking up 252 yards on 14 completions.
"I was able to punish them to get extra yards," said Edwards, who cracked ribs in last year's Eastern final, causing him to miss the Grey Cup game. "Hit them before they hit me."
While Bishop didn't match his heroics of a week ago in the East Division semi-final against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, he did engineer three Argonauts touchdowns.
The first a 22-yard pass to Arland Bruce that pulled Toronto to 23-10 with five minutes to play in the third quarter and seemed to swing the momentum Toronto's way.
But on the Argos' next possession, Ricky Williams's 14-yard run was ruled a fumble after a replay challenge showed the ball coming loose before contact with the ground. The Argos, and a few other people, were surprised to learn that the CFL's rules allow plays blown dead on contact to be overruled as fumbles.
Give the Als credit for being opportunistic. It was on the very next play that Calvillo hit receiver Thyron Anderson for what proved to be the game's decisive score, giving Montreal a commanding 30-10 lead.
But Bishop wasn't done. He fired a touchdown pass to Michael Palmer, and Williams went over the goal line with 2 minutes 3 seconds to play to make the score 30-24 before Montreal added the killer field goal to clinch the game.
"Right now, I don't feel like they beat us, we just ran out of time and came up short," Bishop said. "If we'd had four or five minutes on the clock, we'd have put it in the end zone. No doubt we were going to keep moving it down the field."
Yesterday was the end of Williams's unique year in the CFL. He was serving a suspension for a positive drug test in the National Football League.
"Strangely, I don't feel so many emotions," Williams said. "I'm just looking forward to the flight home and hope we get something positive out of this."
