Author's Note:

The following is a series of posts exploring the Edmonton Oilers, their previous “Decade of Darkness,” and how the team has started to turn things around with the help of Connor McDavid.

To offer readers something different during the NHL’s summer lull, this is Part One of the series—from the perspective of a fan-turned-journalist—and it will continue over the next few weeks. I hope you enjoy the journey.

It wasn't long ago that it was hard to be an Edmonton Oilers fan. Once an elite dynasty, this team is a Stanley Cup contender today. However, for over a decade, the organization had all the pieces it needed to become great, and they gave it all away.

Between the years 1983 and 1990, the Oilers were arguably the best team in all of professional sports. In 2016, they had the chance to show a new generation of fans what it felt like to be champions. In 2024 and 2025, they got as close as any team can get to multiple Cups.

Is this a new time and the pathway to another dynasty? Or, are Oiler fans bracing for another run of darker times?

Getting Introduced to the Oilers as a Kid

My father was never a hockey player. And, when I say that, I don't mean a professional or semi-pro who got a cup of coffee in the big time. I mean, my father never played the game of ice hockey at an organized level—ever.

Born in the United States and having gone to school in Louisville, Kentucky, he barely watched the game most Canadians adore. A market filled with college basketball and college football fans, I can understand why, as Kentucky wasn't exactly the hockey hotbed of North America. But, in 1976—a year before I was born—my father took a job offer at the University of Alberta, and he, my mother, and my older sister moved to Canada.

Heading toward the “Great White North” didn’t suddenly make my dad a hockey aficionado. In fact, as I was growing up and through my earlier years of elementary school, I can’t recall him watching the sport at all. I’m sure he'd come across the odd game or two and he wasn’t ignorant to the NHL, but being far too old to get involved in hockey for the first time, he never took to playing it, so it wasn’t something he encouraged me to play. As a result, I was not one of those kids whose parents put them in organized hockey as soon as they could walk. I'm not sure either of my parents gave any thought to getting me involved in the sport at any age.

In their defense, I never asked.

Instead, we were basketball fans. I played community league ball, school ball, and when I wasn’t doing that, I snuck in a little baseball and golf too. As a basketball player, I was a good shooter, scored my share of points, and despite my size (I'm not quite 6’0), I played in a couple league all-star games and tried out for my local college team. My father says I had pretty good hand-eye coordination, perhaps better than most my age.

But, when it came to hockey… I couldn’t skate worth a lick, and neither could he. Hockey just wasn’t our thing.

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Growing Up in Edmonton... and Hockey on the Sidelines

All that said, when you live in Canada and move to a hockey-mad market like Edmonton, it’s hard not to notice what is always right in front of you. In every grocery store there was an advertisement for the Edmonton Oilers. On the front page of every newspaper was an Oilers-related story. In school, even though ice hockey was not part of the curriculum in gym class, kids talked Oilers. The "cool kids" collected trading cards and filled in their Esso gas station sticker books. At that time, if you were into sports, hockey just sort of became a part of your everyday life. At home, it started to as well.

I learned to like the game. I had a different appreciation for it as a kid than most of my friends. I didn’t love it because I played or was good at it. In fact, even though I’d gone out to our neighborhood lake in the winters and played a little shinny with the kids on our block, I was like Bambi on ice. If I had to describe my "style," I would say I was okay skating forward, but probably looked like my ankles were about to shatter, and I couldn't stop, so I slowed down by heading straight for a snow bank. If I was lucky enough to knock someone else down to stop, I played it off like I made a crushing hit. Trust me, it wasn't intentional. My entire hockey “playing career” was humbling.

Instead, I learned to enjoy the game from afar because it allowed me to fit in and because it gave me something I could share with my dad. Being a social studies professor, he could probably tell you what was going on when some of the biggest happenings in hockey history took place. After all, some of these monumental happenings changed the fabric of the city. I was both too young and too ignorant about the game to really understand the significance of hockey’s biggest moments. It didn't matter, and that wasn't really the point. Hockey was a he-and-I thing.

As a youngster, I remember cheering but was never really sure why. I remember crying in 1988, but I didn’t understand how big a deal it was that Wayne Gretzky was leaving Edmonton. All I knew was that the Edmonton Oilers were a pretty damn good team, and I was starting to pay attention.

Gradually, it became a little more than that. I started to get to know the players by studying the back of their hockey cards, understanding the rules, and understanding the difference between an important game and a meaningless one. In short, I became a fan.

Soon enough, hockey took on a special meaning in my life. Our family had two dogs, and after my sisters got to name the first one, I got to name the second. Even though it was a she, I named her Kurri (after Jari Kurri); Gretzky seemed a bit forced, and he was in L.A.. I won't go as far as to say she was my favorite dog, but I still contend she had one of the coolest names ever.

I remember the first time I could afford a good Christmas present for my father. I saved up, went to the TicketMaster kiosk in West Edmonton Mall and bought him tickets to go with me to watch the Philadelphia Flyers and another to watch the Pittsburgh Penguins. Back then, Northlands Coliseum was still a pretty cool building and tickets didn’t cost nearly what they cost now. I can't recall the outcomes of the games or even who played (I chose those games because of Eric Lindros and Mario Lemieux). I simply relished in the experience.

I remember starting to collect sports cards and buying packs with gum in them. Hockey cards were the easiest to find and that's what everyone else collected, so that’s what I bought. I remember the first real card I pulled from a pack and thought that I'd struck gold was when I pulled a Brett Hull O-Pee-Chee rookie card. Later, I recall hearing that if that specific card had a little yellow dot in the corner in the pin, you were good to go because that meant it was real and not a knock off. Mine had that little yellow dot.

I kept buying and started to build up a pretty good collection. When he could see that I really enjoyed it, my dad joined in. We graduated towards splitting a case of cards with our neighbours (a case was 24 boxes). That was a big deal. No other kid my age bought an entire case of cards. We became avid collectors (probably had enough to open our own shop) and started setting up tables at a few card shows. I don’t think we made a lot of money, but we had a good time. (That was well before the pandemic boom of card collecting revitalized the industry and grading cards became a thing.)

Once we decided that making a little cash was fun too, we stepped up our game and would travel to the U.S., buy cards that were popular in Edmonton but not wherever we were visiting, come back and sell them for a profit. It sort of became a little business for us and we found some real goldmines. We met the who’s who of human oddities along the way. 

Eventually, I took a part-time job at a local sports card store called Bobby's Sports Cards in Sherwood Park, Alberta. To this day, it was one of the neatest jobs I ever had because I loved being there, I was the first to know about everything collectibles-related, and the customers loved to talk hockey. I got paid to do my research. 

Both my father and I learned to love the game. We literally studied it. As a result, we became familiar with the sport. I think that was around the time the first inklings of writing about hockey started to register for me. 

To be continued...

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