This hockey season has been a tumultuous swim for the Crisp Pil Beavers and as this paper goes to press, lodge members (Beavers fans, duh) are excitedly imagining a scenario wherein the team makes it back into the A Final to match up against the (dreaded) Brew Pub for the third time in four years.

A week ago, Jasper commercial league hockey watchers (bless all nine of you) would have been seasick from the intense eye rolling they would have had to do if it was suggested les Castors were going to catapult themselves into contention for the second most coveted trophy in local athletics (the first obviously being the Chilli Cook Off Cup).

But then what pie-in-the-sky Pollyanna would have predicted the team with the most bird cages in the JHL was going to come back and beat the favoured Bonestars with 1.6 seconds remaining in the second-to-last round robin game of the playoffs?

The very 13 Beav-lievers that suited up and went to battle at 9:45 p.m. on a Wednesday night, that’s who!

Full disclosure: your trusty reporter is a full fledged, fully invested, fully-paid-up member of the colony. I played for the Beavers when the Liquor Lodge, SunDog Tours and the Bear Paw Bakery first shelled out for a rack of shiny orange jerseys almost a decade ago (thanks, sponsors!) and have strapped on my 25-year-old hand-me-down hockey equipment underneath that sweater ever since. That makes me one of the old guys on the bench, which I’m only now realizing (crap!), but it also means I have come to know that Beavers are an exciting team to see play well if only because there have been so many years of seeing them play terrible. Not like Outlaws terrible, obviously, but pretty darn bad.

For the last two seasons, however, The Beaver dam has been pretty sturdy. As mentioned, they  chewed their way into the A last year by defeating the Bonestars in the semis and the first half of 2017/18 was going swimmingly until a couple of key players went down with injuries. When the beastly, brainy d-man, Jo Nadeau, took three months off for hernia surgery after too many straight sets of rolling truck tires up hills, followed by the game-controlling, fine wine-appreciating Jacob Clarke getting his knee clipped by some asshat from the BrewPub (oops, is my bias showing?), it was clear the Beaver lodge had sprung a few critical leaks. December and January were painful in Beaverville as the team was only getting an average of eight dudes a game and one of them was me.

Luckily, however, another one of them was a guy named Paul Crane and darn it if during those tough times Craner didn’t bend down a little, look over his shoulder, point to the number 22 on his back and say stoically to the group: “hop on boys, here we go.”

It’s hard to calculate the effect one player can have on a team, but suffice to say when seven sorry saps getting dressed in silence suddenly burst into euphoric applause as the player in question comes through the door, you know the dude’s a difference-maker. That actually happened to me once, but that was back when dressing room brews were tolerated by rink officials (RIP shower beers) and I brought the lads a two-four of Steam Whistle.

Truthfully, however (cue clichéd wrap-up), the Beavers have found a way to win not because their star players score most of their goals (although certainly that doesn’t hurt), but because they’ve been willing to play as a team. The d-core, including Cole Catney, the club’s most improved member (and who’s still working on his chirps) and Mike Nutt, the owner of the team’s most aggressive moustache (and who should probably stop with the chirps), have been moving the puck aggressively. The Hutterite-bearded Clayton Gagnon and collar-popping  Tahlon Sweenie have provided skill down the middle while Webb Bousquet, who like any farm boy from Ontario can be forgiven for wanting to get his jollies out on the ski hill after moving west, is looking like his old self, that is: a farm boy from Ontario.

It wasn’t an easy journalistic choice to naval gaze so shamelessly, but with a 6-5 comeback win against the B-Stars still coursing through my creaky body and the thought of landing in the A Final still a possibility for les Castors, (update: Beavers made it to the 8 p.m.show) it’s been like that time I drank from a stagnant creek while camping—what I mean here kids is the beaver fever is real!