These Province article excerpts hit home to me...421 yards of offence, no turnovers, domination for most of the game...and we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory as the lead title of the article stated.
On a frigid Sunday on the Great Plains, the Lions played their best offensive game of the year, dominated the affair for huge stretches and held a nine-point lead going into the fourth quarter.
And it wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough because they couldn't contain Riders quarterback Darian Durant when it mattered, they gave up too many big play and they didn't land the killing blow when they had a chance late in the third quarter. That, at least, was the precis of a splendid Western semifinal. But it also left too many questions unanswered.
Who, for example, loses a CFL playoff game when they run for 213 yards and don't turn the ball over once? Or, who loses a playoff game when you put together three touchdown drives of over 75 yards while containing the league's self-proclaimed best running back. And who loses when you've got a nine-point lead with two minutes to go in the third quarter and your defence has just presented you the ball on the Roughriders' 51.
The answer, as you may have surmised, is your B.C. Lions, and somewhere in those details was the anatomy of a crushing loss.
But it also went deeper than that. In a marvelous showdown between two warrior-quarterbacks, Durant made the plays he had to in the fourth quarter and Lulay couldn't sustain drives. In the final frame, Durant set up a nine-yard touchdown pass to Weston Dressler with a 35-yard run on a quarterback draw; ripped off a 28-yarder on second-and-10 from his own 23 on, you guessed it, a quarterback draw; then set up Chris Milo for the game-clinching field goal on the same frickin' play.
All told, Durant, who's never been confused with Michael Vick, had six carries for 97 yards. He also completed passes for 53, 61, 61 and 43 yards. The Lions, for their part, didn't have one play over 25 yards – which is remarkable considering they produced 421 yards in total offence.
“We had momentum the whole game,” said running back Andrew Harris, who had 93 yards on 10 carries. “We had the game. We had it. And we let it slip through our hands.”
More to the point, they let Durant slip through their hands.
"When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team". (George Raveling)
