A very dubious anniversary

But more than that, I believe that the Soccer jerseys fall of 1994 killed the passion for sports in this country. And 15 years later, we're still trying to get it back.

To put the 1994 NHL lockout in context, you have to remember that Major League Baseball was on a simultaneous strike that would end up cancelling the World Series. That infamous announcement from Bud Selig came on September 14, cementing those next two weeks as the darkest in professional sports history.

And when both sports emerged from the ashes a few months later, they did so with greatly different images.

The New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup in the shortened 1994-95 season, ushering in a dead puck area, where unfortunately, terms like "the trap" and "left-wing lock" became as common as 'hockey in Florida' and 'Fox's glowing puck'.

The post-strike look of baseball also changed dramatically, when shady players like Brady Anderson and Greg Vaughn started belting 50 homers a season like modern-day incarnations of Jimmie Foxx and Willie Mays. Prior to 1994, we only linked steriods to Ben Johnson and East German females at the Olympics. In the years ahead, the steroid era would tarnish the game's reputation, rendering statistical accomplishments meaningless.
Today, we are celebrating a very dubious anniversary in Canadian Sports. On October 1, 1994, NHL owners decided to lock out the players in a work stoppage that would kill half the regular season.

But I truly believe these two events in the fall of 1994 had a more destructive impact on Canadian fans than our American counterparts.

And while most people will tell you that the Expos died that year, the Blue Jays have never had the same prestige in the post-strike era either. They haven't played a playoff game since Joe Carter touched 'em all in October 1993. In fact, I'll go one step further: When was the last time the Blue Jays played a meaningful, can't miss-game in the last 15 years? You remember the ones we used to watch in the pre-1994 era. Septembers for the Blue Jays used to be about pennant races and setting the rotation for the playoffs. (Note to Cito: You still shouldn't have used Tom Candiotti). Now, the final month of the baseball season in Toronto is spent belly-aching about management and avoiding the Rogers Centre as if it's ground zero for the H1N1 virus.

And our hockey teams were hit equally hard, especially Canada's three biggest cities. When the NHL returned for that sham of a regular season in 1994-95, the Toronto Maple Leafs seemed like a shell of the team that went to back-to-back Conference Finals and had restored the passion of a rabid fan base. Somehow, when the lockout ended, the Gilmour-to-Andreychuk magic had disappeared. It's like they had aged three years during that four-month work stoppage.

In Montreal, the Canadiens would miss the playoffs in that shortened season, laying the groundwork for Patrick Roy's stormy departure a few months later and essentially a decade of futility. Meantime, the Vancouver Canucks lost all of their momentum from a magical run to the Stanley Cup Finals in the spring of 1994. They got swept the next year by Chicago in the second round. Vancouver fans never quite embraced Roman Oksiuta and Josef Berenek like they did Greg Adams and Gerald Diduck from the year before. The magic was stolen away from Vancouver too.

In the fall of 1994, I was a 17-year-old student embarking on my first year of journalism school at Carleton University.

Before that time, guys my age regularly bought hockey cards and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em videos like there was no tomorrow. But after that fall, I never bought either of them again. I might have single-handedly plunged Upper Deck into financial peril.
We all know what happened to the Montreal Expos in the aftermath of the cancelled World Series. They traded their big stars and tried to stay competitive with David Segui in a nearly condemned stadium. It was a recipe for disaster.