Delirious Jets fans dare to dream after Oilers rout

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“It would have been insane!”

Mathieu Perreault was talking about Game 3, his Winnipeg Jets down 4-1 to the Edmonton Oilers well into the third period when his power-play goal started a three-goal comeback that resulted in an overtime 5-4 victory for the Jets.

“The roof would have come off this building,” he added. “I don’t know what to say other than it would be great to have the fans.”

“You know what?” Winnipeg head coach Paul Maurice said after his team had eliminated the Oilers in their opening round of the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs, “We’re jealous here now. We turn on the TV and watch the other playoff series and they’ve got fans and it seems to drive the intensity. ... They’ve got pompoms in their seats and we’ve got coverings in ours, and we’ll have to make our own enthusiasm.”

Lights out for Oilers as Jets seal sweep with triple-OT heartbreaker

It has been yet another curiosity of this most curious NHL season: empty rinks, pumped-in arena sound, cardboard fans and team-colour tarps. For all the advantages of losing the idiots in the first row who hammer on the glass any time they feel a camera on them, the fan-less building has been a novelty that very quickly wore off.

Fans have returned in middling to large numbers at sporting events in the United States, but Canada has moved at a far more cautious case through the COVID-19 pandemic. Quebec has recently loosened regulations and the Montreal Canadiens could have 2,500 spectators at Bell Centre for Saturday’s Game 6 – should there be a Game 6 in a series the Toronto Maple Leafs now lead three games to one, with the Leafs able to wrap up the series Thursday at Scotiabank Arena.

Not so in Manitoba, where the pandemic is classified as “critical” and the province is under stringent stay-at-home restrictions.

“The pandemic is at a high,” Jets forward Paul Stastny said. “A lot of people are stuck at home and you can’t really do anything. You can’t really go outside unless it’s with your family on the long weekend, so that puts a damper on things.”

On the other hand, the veteran player added, these fan-less games may have somewhat of an upside. “They get to watch the game,” Stastny said. “It takes their minds off it a little bit. Then you see other teams and other sports where fans are coming back, so that kind of gets you a little bit hopeful, a little light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Watching Florida [Panthers] and Carolina [Hurricanes] gives me envy – and hope,” Jets captain Blake Wheeler said. “I mean, especially at this time of the year, to see people back in the buildings down there is a sight for sore eyes.”

The fans the Jets are seeing on U.S. television broadcasts might be into it, but nothing, nothing compares to what a packed Bell MTS Place in Winnipeg can be on a playoff run.

There’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about the poster that hangs in the lower lobby of the rink: “The Heart of Canada and birthplace of the most intimidating playoff environment in the NHL.”

When the Jets took on the Minnesota Wild in Round 1 of the 2018 playoffs, they opened with a come-from-behind 3-2 victory that did indeed have that metaphorical roof blowing off the building and into Portage Avenue, where thousands of fans who couldn’t get inside were cheering and blowing their horns.

Inside, the place was packed, as always, with 15,321 fans who screamed “TRUE NORTH!” at the moment the national anthem headed into “strong and free” – “TRUE NORTH!” being the regular salute to the group that brought the Jets home in 2011 after 15 years in the U.S. wilderness. (The first NHL Jets left in 1996 to become the Phoenix Coyotes, Jets 2.0 returned in 2011 when the Atlanta Thrashers relocated.)

There is the famous Jets “Whiteout,” when the entire stands are white from towels and clothes rather than tarps. In the series against the Wild, two women even showed up in their wedding gowns. Others wore white wigs. There was even a polar bear costume. All 15,321 chanting “GO! JETS! GO!”

It has been madness since the original Jets opened as a member of the upstart World Hockey Association in 1972. Owner Ben Hatskin flamboyantly handed over a cheque for $1-million to Bobby Hull before a massive, cheering crowd gathered on the corner of Portage and Main. Hull, then a superstar with the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, gave the new league some credibility and a lot of publicity. The chance to play with Hull brought in Swedish superstars Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson in 1974 to form “The Hot Line.” The Jets would win the Avco Cup, the WHA championship, three times in the 1970s.

But no Stanley Cup was to follow. In 1979, the Jets and several other WHA franchises were folded into the NHL. There would be hometown superstars such as Dale Hawerchuk and Teemu Selanne, but no championships. When the team, struggling financially and in need of a new arena, departed for Phoenix, fans gathered by the thousands at the Forks and wept openly. And wept again when, 15 years later, the Jets returned.

“There is a cultural need for Winnipeg to celebrate its hockey team,” Shannon Sampert, a professor of political science at the University of Winnipeg, wrote in an opinion piece a few years back. “For Winnipeg, the need to prove we’re economically competitive enough to sustain a hockey franchise has been like a scar on our collective identity.”

“We get knocked for our weather,” Joe Daley, goaltender for the original Jets, said in 2018. “We get knocked for our mosquitoes. We get knocked for a lot of things, but we’re loved for our hockey team.

“It’s sort of like we’ve been adopted by the rest of the country.”

It’s now 2021 and that may happen, especially if the Jets were to move on as the only Canadian team to reach the semi-finals.

Perhaps by then the arena doors will open again, if only slightly.

“It’s just too damn bad our fans weren’t in the building,” Wheeler said after the Round 1 win, “because that would have been something.”

And will, certainly, at some point be something once again.