In a way, Ams helped Chiefs to banner season

Last season, the Spokane Chiefs failed to earn the division title.

The Chiefs also missed out on the banner for finishing with the league’s best record through the regular season. But tonight, before dropping the puck against Tri-City in the first home game of the season, the Chiefs will hang the two banners that in the end really matter.

The Arena wall will be decorated with the Chiefs’ new WHL championship banner they earned when they won the Ed Chynoweth Cup with a sweep of the Lethbridge Hurricanes, and their Memorial Cup championship banner they won when they defeated the hometown Kitchener Rangers at the end of May in Kitchener, Ontario.

The Americans should get some credit for the Chiefs’ success. Last season’s playoff march for Spokane probably began with a heartbreaking loss March 15.

Set in Kennewick’s Toyota Center, the Chiefs and the Americans – longstanding and bitter U.S. Division rivals – prepared for their 12th and final meeting of the regular season.

It was a contest between common opponents, with the most uncommon of circumstances. The winner – which was Tri-City by a score of 2-1 – not only earned the right to drop a division banner in its home opener this season, it also won the Scotty Munro Trophy as the WHL’s top team and earned home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs.

“That one was a heartbreaker for sure,” said first-year head coach Hardy Sauter, who was the Chiefs’ assistant coach last season under Bill Peters. “But you look back and I think for us it kind of lit a fire. It certainly left us with a bad taste.”

The rest of the story – which unfolded not more than four months ago – is pretty well-known in these parts. Spokane swept Everett in the first round of the WHL playoffs and went on to dethrone the 2007 Memorial Cup champion Vancouver Giants in a six-game, second-round series. Next was the conference championship marathon between the Chiefs and the Americans.

“We knew that the series was going six or seven,” Sauter said.

They split the first and second games, which ended 1-0 in double overtime in Kennewick, before Spokane won 2-0 at home in Game 3.

The Americans knotted the series again with a 3-2 overtime victory in Spokane before the Chiefs won the fifth game 4-3 (again in double overtime) and took a 3-2 series lead.

With Spokane one win away from advancing to the WHL championship, Tri-City forced a Game 7 with a 2-1 overtime victory in Spokane and the teams traveled down Highway 95 for another winner-take-all scenario. Spokane scored three times in the third period to end the series – and the Americans’ season – with a 4-1 victory.

The Chiefs’ loss in Game 6 was their final of the season.

“From our point of view, we thought we should have won Game 6 – we had more scoring chances and just played a pretty complete game, and it didn’t happen,” Sauter said. “(Tri-City) could probably argue, too, that in the first two periods of Game 7 they should have been up by two or three goals.”

Now that it’s all over, they’ll look back and always remember the series that Peters dubbed “an instant classic.”

“It was just an unbelievable series,” Sauter said. “And at the time we didn’t really appreciate how exciting and overwhelming it all was.”

Sauter expects the rivalry to be just as hot this season.

“There are a couple of guys that maybe still have a taste of last year, whether it be good or bad,” Sauter said. “The division is going to be close and every win is huge. I really like to think that if you want to get out of the (Western Conference) this season that you are going to have to beat Spokane or Tri-City – or both – in order to move on in the playoffs.”