Sport nostalgia in Sudbury holds true to little in the way of seasonal consistency.<.p>

How else to explain that a chance encounter at an opening athletic event of the summer would give way to the story of one of the most dramatic high-school provincial hockey championships in northern Ontario history.

Having recently attended – and competed in – the Sudbury Rocks Marathon (just the 5 km distance, to be clear), I was pleased to cross paths with masters track & field competitor Dave McGill. And while this encounter would lead to some chatter of track and running and such, it also served as a reminder to the 77 year old of a recently unearthed nickel city nostalgia treasure.

A depiction of the final of the 1968 OFSAA Boys Hockey final in Hamilton had found its way into a box of collectibles maintained by McGill’s mother, a memento that any good Lockerby lad might hold near and dear, given the Vikings 6-5 win, in overtime, over the Toronto York Memorial Mustangs.

The irony in this discovery can be found everywhere.

For starters, Dave McGill was not a hockey player, but rather a pretty decent track athlete, talented enough to capture the city mile in his final year at Lockerby Composite, breaking the record held at the time by Jim Dickson.

Furthermore, in late winter of 1968, the McGill’s did not even live in Sudbury.

“We had moved to Brantford, so I assume that my mother saw the article (it appeared in the Hamilton Spectator) and saw that it was Lockerby and kept the paper,” said McGill, making his back to Sudbury in 1975 and remaining in the area ever since. “It was only when she passed that I found all sorts of neat stuff.”

This gold medal affair was more than just “neat”, a whole lot more in the mind of the man who steered Lockerby Composite to a pair of OFSAA titles (1965 & 1968). “You’ll never see another hockey game like that in this arena (Mountain Arena),” was the quote attributed to Vikings’ head coach Stu Duncan in the story.

While one might consider the winning coach to be prone to a bit of hyperbole, consider the following: the game was tied at 4-4 when Robbie Ellis pushed York into the lead at the 18:08 mark of period three. But with Lockerby goaltender John Canning on the bench in favour of an extra attacker, Joe Natale scored with 38 seconds to play to force overtime.

Just a minute in the extra session, Paul Brunelle sent the Sudbury faithful into a frenzy, picking the biggest time to net a tally that had been very hard to come by for a minor hockey sniper who would go on to enjoy a handful of years with the University of New Hampshire Wildcats.

“I had loads of opportunities to score that game,” recalled Brunelle, now 75 years old but still active in the local sports scene, guiding Lockerby Composite pole vaulters that dominated the city track and field meet last week. “I had one on ones but just didn’t have the finesse to get by.”

Well, not until it counted the most.

“There was a faceoff on the right side of their goalie. I was a right winger and the puck came to me and I wristed it into the net. I remember skating down the ice to celebrate and threw my hockey stick into the stands – and wondered what did I do that for,” laughed Brunelle.

“It was just the excitement.”

It was that kind of excitement that not only would help lure Brunelle to the Duncan-led Vikes, but also keep him there despite the recruitment efforts of the Sudbury Wolves, a Northern Ontario Junior B team at that time.

“I had played in the midget league in Sudbury and was one of the top scorers,” said Brunelle, inducted into the Sudbury Sports Hall of Fame in 2015 as an administrator, largely for his work as a coach at Lockerby with countless different sports, but certainly nordic skiing, more notably.

“I ended up with the (Vikings) junior team in grade nine. I was pretty good so they brought me up for the senior team for a game or two and a couple of practices. We trained in Copper Cliff and where other (high-school) teams were getting one practice a week, we were getting two. We were happy to get the extra ice time.”

Seemingly, it showed on the ice, though such was the depth of talent on the team that additional practice time only sufficed to help the rich get richer. “We had a really good team, with Dave Pulkkinen, the Bradley Brothers, Joe Natale,” said Brunelle. To wit, joining the latter and Natale on the scoresheet that day were Pulkkinen, Gord Bradley, Bruce Herridge and Sandy McKinty, with captain Steve Watkinson collecting the hardware when all was said and done.

More irony to add to this tale as the Lockerby Vikings did not even lay claim to a SDSSAA banner this year. As best as Brunelle could recall, his team qualified for NOSSA (where they beat the Scollard Hall Bears from North Bay) due to the fact that they finished the regular season in first place.

But in a single game tilt to determine Sudbury bragging rights and hosted after the provincial playdowns were done, it would be the Copper Cliff Braves who would come out on top. Not that Brunelle was about to lose sleep over this.

“At the time, games like this are really exciting for a day or two – but I don’t honestly go back on it much at all.”

Thankfully, the same could not be said for Dave McGill’s mother.