Memorial Cup Runneth Over

A Foreur is a miner.

Guelph was named after a Hanoverian branch of the British royal family.

And that’s your Chrysler Memorial Cup scouting report.

The Final Four of junior hockey pulls into our town this weekend for a nine-day stay, with all the pomp and circus act that surrounds any big-time athletic event - and some of the fitful anticipation of billeting a foreign exhange student.

The three honored guests offer no middle ground for the host Spokane Chiefs.

There are the Portland Winter Hawks, who the Chiefs and their subjects know all too well.

And there are the Guelph Storm and Les Foreurs de Val-d’Or, who are known not at all.

Well, we know which is from Quebec, at least.

Otherwise, they’re perfect strangers - as the Chiefs are to them - and key components in the conspiracy of time, distance and perpetual playoffs that makes winning the Memorial Cup one of the most problematic quests in sports.

We’re not talking Cinderella. Guelph won the Ontario final in five games, Val-d’Or the Quebec series in a sweep.

But if, say, Valparaiso had somehow made it to college basketball’s Final Four, CBS and Sports Illustrated would have made sure we not only knew whether the coach preferred man or zone, but whether his sweet-shooting kid preferred boxers or briefs.

Information is not quite so cheap in junior hockey. First you start with an atlas.

Then you get on the phone.

This much Chiefs general manager Tim Speltz found out from his National Hockey League connections:

“They told me it would be the best Memorial Cup going in that they could remember,” he said, “based on the strength of the four teams.”

That is, the way the three league champions bludgeoned their way through their respective finals - and the way Spokane pushed Portland to the limit in the Western Hockey League division finals.

But that’s hardly a deep, dark secret.

Neither is the fact that Val-d’Or has a brilliant goaltender (Roberto Luongo) and an even more brilliant winger (Jean-Pierre Dumont), nor that Guelph is gritty, methodical, defensive-minded.

“You want to know everything about your opposition,” admitted Chiefs coach Mike Babcock, whose team opens the tournament against the Quebec champs on Saturday and then meets Guelph on Monday night.

“Right now, you’re dependent on other people (for your information) - and one thing I know about this game, you try not to depend on anyone other than the guys in your room.”

Perhaps even more so in the off-beat, round-robin format of the Memorial Cup.

“From now on, every game is like our Game 6 against Kelowna, or Game 7 against Portland,” said Speltz. “Everything’s riding on every game because you only get one crack at a team - unless you make the final, and then history doesn’t matter anyway.

Babcock puts it another way.

“In short-term playoffs like this,” said Babcock, who has coached in similar circumstances in the World Junior Championships and Canada’s national collegiate tournament, among others, “the key is living in the present.

“By that, I mean each shift, each game, each day. Discipline is everything. Emotional control is everything.”

Though the Chiefs have had lapses in that department during the playoffs, they had the best of alibis: they were bulletproof. As the hosts of the Cup, they would be playing in May regardless of how they played in March. Knowing you’re sure to reach the destination tends to lessen the appreciation for the journey, and yet Spokane still won 45 regular season games and 10 more in the playoffs.

“There have been more challenges this year in that respect,” said Speltz, “than we’ll probably have in the next three or four put together.”

If complacency has been the enemy all season, now it would seem to be chance.

“In a series, a team beats you,” Speltz said. “In one game, a player can.

“A hot goalie, an unsung hero - it’s happened all the time in a game, even over the course of a tournament. That said, it’s very seldom do you leave (the Memorial Cup) thinking the best team didn’t win.”

In a stretch of five years earlier this decade, that was usually the WHL team - starting with the Chiefs in 1991 and then the Kamloops Blazers three of the next four years. Then Granby and Hull won the last two Cups, the first for the Quebec league since the Cornwall Royals won back-to-back in 1980 and ‘81.

“There was a time, I think, when the Quebec teams were just satisfied to win their league,” said Speltz. “The last couple of years, their expectations have grown to the point where they think this thing is as much theirs as it as anybody else’s.”

Of course, we’ve overlooked one important element in this scouting report.

“As glad as the guys will be to play two new teams,” said Speltz, “if you ask them, the team they really want to see again is Portland.”