The Saskatchewan Roughriders had tunnel-vision leading up to the 2013 Grey Cup game.
There wasn’t any debate. Instead of being introduced individually, one by one, the Roughriders’ players resolved to charge out of the tunnel and on to the field as a group.
It was an emphatic, unforgettable statement by a team that went on to defeat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 45-23 before 44,710 generally giddy eyewitnesses at historic Mosaic Stadium.
“It was pretty straightforward,” receiver Rob Bagg recalls. “We did our prayer in the locker room and all the captains were in agreement that we were going out as a team. We came into this thing together and we were going to go out and take the field together. That was really it.
“To the people in the tunnel, I apologize to them, because I’m sure it was a nightmare on their end as far as how they organized everything for TV. I’m sure they had a big thing prepared.
“They certainly said, ‘Hey, you guys aren’t all going out together,’ but there weren’t a lot of words said. It was known that we were going out together. That was a very, very unified squad we had in 2013. Everybody had a common interest, a common goal.”
Everybody from that championship team — the fourth in Roughriders history — was invited back for Saturday’s matchup with Hamilton (5 p.m., Mosaic Stadium).
On Legends Night, as it was dubbed when the Roughriders’ theme games for 2023 were announced in April, the first 5,000 fans to enter the stadium will receive a replica 2013 Grey Cup ring.
At halftime, the 2013 Roughriders are to be inducted as a team into the SaskTel Plaza of Honour.
One shouldn’t expect them to charge on to the field, en masse, as robustly as they did a decade ago. But the mere introduction of that topic still generates emotion and excitement.
“It wasn’t just the players who dressed for the game,” linebacker Mike McCullough notes. “It was everybody. The guys who weren’t dressed joined the scrum, too.
“I think it caught everybody by surprise, too, in the stadium, which kind of ramped up the energy a little bit more. It’s always going to be loud, but it seemed like it was deafening when we all came out, just like a mob.
“It was like you’re coming to a gunfight, and there’s 50 of you versus one.”
The first half was suitably one-sided. Saskatchewan carried a 31-6 lead into halftime.
“I don’t think there was ever a moment, from the time we warmed up to when that game ended, that we ever thought we weren’t going to win,” Bagg says. “I just felt like that was our time, our moment.
“Looking across the field at a very, very good Hamilton team, I just didn’t think that it was as important to them at that time as it was to us.
“I just felt like we played with complete confidence knowing that, although it wouldn’t be a perfect game, we weren’t going to allow it to slip away.
“Fortunately, we didn’t, and it was a night to remember.”
