By Paul Osborne, Guelph Tribune

There are many reasons why someone is driven to purchase season tickets for an Ontario Hockey League team.  It is a great way to support your home team and community, it is a fun night out shared by couples, friends or parents and children and the price is usually right.  But I think the most important reason is the fact you get to watch young boys turn into young men and you can’t help but wonder how the really good ones might do once they leave your town for bigger cities and bigger contracts. 

If you are a Guelph Storm fan you’ve probably never played shinny with the likes of Drew Doughty, Dustin Brown or Ryan Callahan; you may never have given them any advice they could carry with them throughout their lives but as a regular fan you have at least shared something with them: first goals, great hits, an end-to-end rush or maybe a hat trick or two.

You can’t tell me that Guelph Storm fans didn’t take a little more than the average fan from Canada’s tremendously exciting 3-2 overtime win over the United States in the Olympic Gold medal game.  What Storm fan didn’t flash back to a chubby 16-year-old Doughty doing the little spin-a-rama the rest of Canada got to see (for the first time) over the past two weeks.  Or Callahan crashing in on the forecheck as he did so many times behind the opposing net at the Sleeman Centre.  And Brown, especially on the one shift driving in off the wing beating the defenceman (who happened to be his Los Angeles Kings teammate Doughty), creating a great chance on goal like fans in Guelph had seen many times before.

No junior team in the CHL produced more Olympians than the Storm.  With Fedor Tyutin on Russia and Herbert Vasiljevs playing for Latvia, the Storm had five players vying for the gold medal.  In one other Storm twist, Storm co-owner Chris Cuthbert had the thrill of calling the gold medal game and his words “Sidney Crosby, the Golden goal” will live along with Foster Hewitt’s “Henderson has scored for Canada!” and Dan Kelly’s 1987 call “He shoots, he Scores…Mario Lemieux!”

But for Doughty it was his coming out party.  His name raised more than a few eyebrows when selecteded to the team.  I had friends from outside Guelph call me to ask “Is he really that good?”  “Will he be able to take the pressure?”

My answer was….”Just wait until you see him play, he is mature beyond his years.”  And that he was.  It wasn’t long before he was in the top four defencemen on the team playing with Duncan Keith of the Chicago Blackhawks.  Driving forward deep into the opposing zone one shift, then laying out a forward with a hard hit in his own end on the next.

He has a lot to prove and long road ahead but if he continues on his current pace, he has the opportunity to become one of the greatest defencemen Canada has ever produced, right up their with the likes of Paul Coffey, Raymond Bourque and his teammate Scott Niedermayer.

We all wanted Canada to win but I think there was a little “proud parent” in all of us as we watched our three Guelph Storm offspring play their hearts out for a piece of gold that will mark them forever.

From the Land of Oz….The Guelph Storm won two of three games this weekend and moved into the eighth and final playoff spot, one point ahead of Owen Sound.  Taylor Beck had two goals to lead the Storm to a 6-5 win over Peterborough and Brandon Foote made 42 saves to beat Plymouth 3-2.  Foote was also brilliant in Saginaw stopping 34 pucks but the Storm fell 4-3 to the Spirit.  Had they won that game they would have only been two points out of seventh but now sit six back…The Storm were among a handful of Canadians who didn’t watch the gold medal game live as their two games overlapped.  They did have it taped and watched it on the way home in the bus.