LIFE'LL KILL YA: REQUIEM FOR DWAYNE ROLOSON, WHO'S KIND OF LIKE WARREN ZEVON

Dwayne Roloson deserved better than having his season end on a play that fits in with what Alanis Morissette believes is Ironic.

It's like waiting your whole career to be on hockey's biggest stage .... and getting knocked out in the very first game.

This space has focused a lot on the Oilers goalie, who's now done for the playoffs, and how the media doesn't get what Roloson is all about. Drawing from personal experiences, the best analogy is that Roloson is akin to a singer-songwriter such as the late, great Warren Zevon. Zevon was one-of-a-kind, producing albums that got that double-edged description of "critical acclaim." The majority of people, who don't always pay close attention, knew little about that, perhaps noting only Zevon had one big cross-over hit with Werewolves of London and that David Letterman took a shine to him.

There was a lot more to him than that, just as there's a lot more to Roloson than this roll he was on until Aaron Ladd landed on his knee last night and sent the Stanley Cup final spinning off its axis.

To totally run this analogy into the grond, there's no indie circuit for goalies. Roloson isn't some "garden-variety journeyman goalie," to co-opt Damien Cox's phraseology, even though the parts fit: never drafted, long apprenticeship as a backup, never been an every-night goalie.

My friend and one-time editor Keith Borkowsky has played some goal himself and used to say that Ed Belfour, but for a twist of fate, might have ended up as the greatest beer-league goalie in the world. Roloson belongs to that group of goalies, with Belfour and and Curtis Joseph. All three are superb goaltenders who were passed over in the cattle call that is the NHL entry draft and never played Major Junior, but proved their worth after many of the less talented goaltenders whom the GMs and scouts had an agenda to push along -- much the same way the music industry promotes no-talent eye-candy -- had crapped out. The difference is that Roloson waited much, much longer to get the chance to be The Guy.

Sure, it was the eve of 6/6/06 -- 666, get it? -- but there were no omens that it was all going to end for Edmonton this suddenly. In a game that showed how much hockey has improved in '05-06, and in a game that was as good as any Stanley Cup final contest played since the '94 Canucks-Rangers final, it all ended with an unsatisfying thud. Too bad, since between the Chris Pronger penalty shot, Cam Ward's glove saves and Ray Whitney scoring twice against the team he was once a stickboy for, this game had a lot to offer.

With just under six minutes left, tied 4-4, Marc-André Bergeron knocked Ladd down on a drive toward the net. Ladd lands on Roloson's knee, putting him out of the series and probably costing him, oh, taking a couple years and a million per off the offers he was set to command in free agency.

Ty Conklin -- who hadn't played in about three months and was one of the reasons the Oilers traded for Roloson and didn't clinch a playoff spot until the very end of the regular season -- goes in net. Conklin, predictably, gave up the puck in the final minute, giving Carolina a 5-4 win and, as per Off Wing Opinion's suggestion, making Bill Simmons' 13 Levels of Losing required reading for Oilers fans.

Oh, there's a possibility Edmonton could come back and still win with Jussi Markkanen, but it's somewhere between the hope of a Texas death-row inmate getting clemency on the same day time travel is perfected. Don't worry, the real sportswriters will spend the next 24 hours cobbling together reasons for why the Oilers can win without the goalie who got them to the Big Dance.

It's just impossible to imagine the Oilers recovering without Roli and while Markkannen can get on a roll, there's a reason he hasn't been playing. (Hint: It has to do with the fact his save percentage was dead last among the NHL's 42 regular netminders.)

The upshot is for Edmonton is that this is the loss that kills the body, but it will take a couple days for the head to die. It's not unlike the Bill Buckner or Don Denkinger games in baseball 20 years ago, Games 4 and 5 of the 2004 Red Sox-Yankees series or Game 1 of the Senators-Sabres showdown this year. They're a Deadmonton Team Walking.

Some will say this is the latest example of Carolina being conspicuously lucky -- they beat the Canadiens after Saku Koivu's eye injury, they beat the defensively depleted Sabres, and now this. The other day, there was an advance story about how the 'Canes have betten three red-hot goalies -- Cristobal Huet, Marty Brodeur and Ryan Miller. Now they won't even get the chance, but remember that before The Injury, they had made their own luck by climbing out of a 3-0 hole.

Classic hockey rule of thumb: there's only winners and losers at this time of year. Luck plays a role, but Ward and his teammates gave themselves a chance.

Let's just say only the NHL could have this happen. For the first 54 minutes last night's game, it was building up to be the rare Stanley Cup final that's as good as the series that led up to it, with excitement and interest building with each game. Then two plays -- The Injury and The Giveaway -- turned the Oilers from vital to a vapour.

Or in a word, Deadmonton. And isn't it ironic that it's now out to make joke about that you hoped the Oilers would win, since you'd heard there were still some businesses on Whyte Ave. that hadn't had their windows smashed yet. It's not a good day to be a hockey cynic.

It's brutally unfair for Roloson, but like Warren Zevon sang on Life'll Kill Ya, "The doctor is in and he'll see you now / He doesn't care who you are."

Those words became eerily prophetic when Zevon died of lung cancer three years after releasing that album. By all accounts, he accepted his fate with a kind of sangroid that bordered on surreal.

So will Roloson. He'll have too.

OTHER BUSINESS

• Hate to keep harping on this, but the Toronto Star's game story referred to the infamous Steve Smith giveaway from 20 years ago occurring "in Game 7 of the Western Conference final." First of all, it was the Campbell Conference then, and Smith's gaffe didn't even come in the conference final: it was the Smythe Division final (conference semi in today's argot).
• Battle of Alberta takes out a little anger on Don Cherry, saying he should retire. Dude, I said that more than two years ago!
• About Chris Pronger's penalty shot goal, the first in NHL championship series history: Pronger got the chance since the line the Oilers had on the ice included infrequent scorers Georges Laraque, Ethan Moreau and Rem Murray. While that's only one letter off from the old Russian KLM line, any similarities were strictly alphabetical.
  
  But it begs the question, one I joked about during the regular season when the Leafs kept putting out the same players time and again in shootout situations: Why not give defencemen a chance? Goalies don't have "a book" on their tendencies, so they have an element of surprise while being less likely to overthink the situation and be all sweet and no finish -- the exact opposite of Pronger, who picked a corner (not the five-hole, as I originally thought) like he does this all the time. In fact, it was the first he'd taken in the NHL.
• The game is the top story on Sports Illustrated's website. You have to wonder, though, what Gary Bettman and his band of P.R. paranoiacs think of this billing for its playoff blog: "Drop the gloves during the playoffs with SI.com's writers."
• Major respect to Chris Lynch, my fellow erstwhile regular at Sportspages: at the start of the playoffs, Chris was one of a handful of people who took Carolina to win the Cup when Off Wing Opinion took a poll.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.