February 28th, 2003
The road trip from hell! Well ok, that’s not quite fair, the road trip itself wasn’t bad at all. The bus rides on the other hand…

I guess we don’t have much to complain about. We knew what we were getting into when we were planning the trip, but 8 hours each way is a little excessive. It wouldn’t have been that bad if Toronto was actually 8 hours away, but I’ve done the trip in less than 5 hours before. That’s what you get when you take the scenic tour to Toronto by way of Ottawa. It probably didn’t help any that Irene and I stayed up until 4am the night before having to catch the bus, but then again hindsight is 20/20.

So anyway, we (Antoine, Irene, and I) got to Toronto after travelling through Butt-f*ck-nowhere backwoods Ontario. We met up with Irene’s friend Jill (who lives in Toronto) at the bus station. She led us around the city, and let us stay at her apartment overnight. Isn’t she nice? So we went to the ACC and picked up our tickets, which were pre-purchased by Suzanne (newlaxfan2). Thanks Suzanne. It was then off to Badali’s for a little pre-game meal. Mmm… food. This is also where we met the last member of our little lacrosse-fairing group Les (Jill’s boyfriend). After we ate it was back to the ACC to watch the game.

Quite a disappointing game really. I can’t speak for Antoine (although I’m pretty sure he feels the same), but I know that Irene and I wanted Calgary to wipe the floor with Toronto. I’m not going to start bashing the Rock or anything, but there are two reasons why we wanted Calgary to win:

1. Calgary has 4 former Express players (Palidwor, Kelusky, MacArthur, and Forbes), whereas Toronto only has 1 (Richard), and 2. We are Montrealers therefore everything from Toronto sucks.

Unfortunately it didn’t happen. If you really want to you can go check the game report for the final score, but I’m not going to put it in this review because it’s too humiliating. Needless to say, it was a blow-out in favour of the Rock. I get sad just thinking about it, so I’m going to stop and head on to the post-game party.

Not a bad post-game party at all. We met up with a bunch of people from the message board (Meathead, Rock_Ink, WingsfaninNY, Mony and a couple others who I’m not quite sure what their names are). We had a great chat with Curtis Palidwor. Kelusky looked like he would’ve liked to talk with us a bit more, but he was being bombarded with people. I’m just happy we got his signature. We also met two random guys who were really impressed that we came all the way from Montreal. One of them said that he used to play lacrosse with Terry Sanderson back in the day, which I thought was pretty cool.

We ended up getting 4 out of 5 signatures, and almost got the 5th. We had all but given up trying to find Brad MacArthur when Curtis told us that he was probably at the hotel, and told us which hotel they were staying at. We went to the hotel, I called his room and somebody answered. He didn’t say who it was, but he said that Brad was in the hallway somewhere. I explained to him that we were fans that came all the way from Montreal, and wanted to get his signature. He seemed quite impressed by the fact that we had come all that way, and said to come on up. There was only one problem, he didn’t tell us which room. I thought I heard him say 7th floor, but that didn’t pan out, when I called back there was no answer. We tried searching various other parts of the building to no avail, and eventually decided to leave. I guess we’ll just have to get you next time Brad.

February 1st, 2003
Ah, another year of lacrosse. Most fans would be discouraged, not having a team and all, but not us; we’ll just follow the players. This is the first game that we went to since last year in Montreal, and the first time that Alex, Emma, Irene, and I met Antoine. Alex, Dan (who didn't come this time), Emma, Irene, and I have all known each other for years.

We (all except Antoine, who was on a different bus) got to Ottawa a little early and decided to walk around for a bit and check out the Winterlude festivities. We walked all the way from the Parliament Buildings to Lansdowne Park by way of the Rideau Canal, which for those of you who don't know Ottawa is a pretty good stretch. Luckily for us it wasn't that cold out, and the wind was quite bearable.

We got to Lansdowne Park (that's where the Civic Centre is) and walked in to buy our tickets. Some guy came over and asked us, "Is one of you Imo?" and that's how we met Antoine. Now that we all knew each other it was time to watch the game. We bought our tickets, found our seats, and cheered our hearts out. It was a good game, but the atmosphere was a little different than I'm used to. I guess I was expecting it to be something like the Molson Centre. Boy was I off.

Then it was off to the post-game party, with a brief stop off at Zellers to buy a Sharpie so that we could get our jerseys signed. We walked into Local Heroes and got ourselves a table, sat down, and ordered some nachos and drinks. We figured that it would be the perfect time to go look for the players while we were waiting for our order, so that’s exactly what we did.

As we were walking back to find the players I stopped and asked Irene how we would recognize them. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "Let's hope they see our jerseys". Not 5 seconds later Brandon Sanderson yelled, "EXPRESS!" from across the bar. So we went over to see him, chatted for a bit, and with his help we got all of the signatures except for Eric Pacey, who wasn't at the post-game party. Don’t worry Pacey; we’ll catch you next time.

All in all it was a great day, we even got a little bonus at the end. It was when Brandon was leaving. He passed right in front of our table, so I yelled out “EXPRESS!”. He looked at us and said, (and I quote) “You guys are the best fans in the world”. He could have been talking about Express fans in general, or (as we would like to think) directly to us, but either way it was awesome to hear.