WW's Big Adventure (Epilogue)

IT'S ALL OVER AND THE FINGER-POINTING HAS OFFICIALLY BEGUN.

Yes, the team I grew up cheering for and which I now cover for the biggest newspaper in my province lost our national football championship on Sunday to our rivals from the West.

Oh well. There's always next year, they gave it 110 per cent, the other team just "made more plays than we did," as the incredibly stupid cliches go.

And the football season, finally, is over here in the Great White North.

We are now officially the city with the longest championship drought, now dating back 17 years since we haven't won it in 1990 in Vancouver (I was there for that game too).

Sob, sob. But fans of the other team really deserved to win this. They hadn't won since 1989 in Toronto, another game I covered.

I returned from Toronto late last night, the last straggler from my newspaper to do so, only to find about 122 dishes and pots and pans piled up in the kitchen sink, on the counter, on the couch, courtesy of my son who turned 16 today.

Whilst I contemplate the different ways in which I will wring his neck (figuratively, not literally, although it's tempting...), I thought I'd wrap up the week that was...at least the parts I can remember.

And if I can't remember a lot, it's not because I was inebriated, not even once, except maybe late Sunday night, after the game and my work was all done.

They call this Canada's "Grand National Drunk," or at least they used to. And I certainly did see plenty of people well beyond failing sobriety tests.

But because we had our local university team in Toronto competing for their national championship the same week as the Grey Cup (THEY won), I had to cover two championships in the same week.

That meant 15-hour days and very little time for sight-seeing, drinking or walking about Canada's largest city.

I did get out Tuesday night for a nice supper and Saturday for a bit of carousing, some great Italian food and some blues music.

But for the most part, I was confined to my hotel and room service.

The hotel, as I explained in my previous post, is attached to the Rogers Centre, a 53,000 seat domed stadium that most of Canada still calls SkyDome.

Staying in a hotel attached to the football stadium where the game will be played has its perks, but also its peculiarities.

I was on the seventh floor and the elevator was (I counted) 241 paces from my room. It took me almost two minutes to walk to my room from the elevator.

I expended as much energy doing just that as the players did in their daily practices. Following are some pictures to give you a glimpse...

The tall building on the right is the CN Tower, until recently the world's tallest free-standing structure. The big wide domed building to its left is the Skydome, to which is attached the hotel I stayed at.

This is the hotel itself, with the CN Tower, well, towering above it.

These are my feet looking through the glass floor at the top of the CN Tower.

This is me jumping from the CN Tower in my cool red track suit that everyone loved.

Here is another angle of me jumping from the CN Tower.

Here's just another football shot of the winning team celebrating as a pictorial segue to the end of this epic journey by WW to Canada's Centre of the Universe.

I returned to a wintry Winnipeg full of cold, snow and a pile of dishes.

It sure is great to be home.