TAIT: Skinner's return to Edmonton likely to draw cheers, tears from Oilers fans |
When word hit social media circles early Wednesday afternoon Stuart Skinner was in the starter’s crease for the Pittsburgh Penguins in Calgary against the Flames … well, spoiler alerts don’t get much better.
Odds are high Skinner will not face his former team tonight, the Edmonton Oilers.
So fans won’t see him in a goalie’s crease at Rogers Place. But rather sitting at the end of the Penguins bench. Baseball cap, of course.
Wherever Skinner is, one thing is certain — Kleenex is required.
For this is not merely another netminder making a routine occupational migration in the peripatetic world of professional hockey.
This is a Sherwood Park son coming home, a young man whose very essence embodies the prairie values of authenticity, humility, and that increasingly rare commodity in modern athletics: genuine humanity.
The waterworks, one suspects, could rival the great floods of biblical proportions.
Because Skinner isn’t just a goaltender who happened to play in Edmonton; he was — is — Edmonton, in every meaningful sense of the........