By Howard Tsumura
VarsityLetters.ca
VANCOUVER — So much of the time, the easiest way to gauge the greatness of a football game is to lather in its own gaudy bath of offensive numbers.
Yet it seems that the truest gems are often times those games which arise out of nowhere, those wholly organic ones somehow stitched together by one selfless play after another to the point where eventually, the ties that bind are unmistakably all a part of the greatest whole.
That’s what we saw Friday night at Thunderbird Stadium.
“I knew they had to throw the ball, they were deep in their own end zone and running wasn’t an option… so I knew the ball was coming out,” explained Darrien Brown, UBC’s rising star at defensive halfback when asked for his take on the defining moment of UBC’s see-it-to-believe-it 23-22 Homecoming win over the Calgary Dinos.
“So I dropped back, I read the quarterback’s eyes and boom, it was right into my hands,” he continued, still incredulous as he stood on the field just moments after the game. “Man, I don’t know what to tell you… just don’t throw it my way.”
Brown’s sideline interception at the Calgary 13-yard line with 2:10 remaining and UBC trailing 22-20 set the stage for a Friday night finish heart-stopping enough to hold its own among the best stretch-drive endings in program history.
And that it came in front of a sell-out Homecoming game crowd of 7,500 at the old ball yard, at a juncture in the ‘Birds season in which a loss and subsequent 1-3 start at the midway mark of the Canada West season would have pretty much put the playoffs out of reach just made it all the more significant.
Brown’s prayer-answering pick, the capper on a game in which UBC’s much-maligned defence made perhaps more big plays at key moments than any game in recent memory, came on the heels of another special play…. by the team’s ace fifth-year special teams’ kicker and punter Kieran Flannery-Fleck.
After UBC running back Tolu Ayedegbe had capped a 95-yard scoring drive with a three-yard touchdown run to ignite a comeback which had pulled the ‘Birds to within 22-20 with just over two minutes remaining, Flannery-Fleck’s subsequent kick-off seemed blessed by the football gods above.
By the time mid-September arrives on Point Grey, there is a point in the evening when the heat of the day finds itself at odds with the speed of the setting sun, resulting in the turf at Thunderbird Stadium finding itself magically covered with dew.
And when Flannery-Fleck’s offering touched down on that dew at the Calgary 17-yard line in front of Dinos’ return man Trey Loupelle, it spat out a formula of velocity and inertia that translated into what could only be called a true ‘UBC bounce’.
Loupelle misjudged its sharp actions, but still managed to provide chase, downing the ball at the two-yard line, thus setting the stage for the pass from quarterback David Jordan that snatched away by Brown’s high-point pick.
UBC turned that takeaway into a 17-yard Flannery-Fleck field goal to take a 23-22 lead with 1:37 remaining.
Jordan, however, caught fire with four completions for 59 yards, marching Calgary into position for what appeared to everyone in the stadium as the calm before a game-winning walk-off 39-yard field goal.
Yet in one of those moments which can be explained only by those previously-referenced football gods, the kick by Vince Triumbari sailed wide left.
“Let’s be honest,” UBC head coach Blake Nill said afterwards. “That game, we made just enough plays to win. We got lucky in the end, right? And that’s just the way it is. Calgary fell one play short, otherwise they would be jumping all around here.”
Nill, now in his 28th season as a university head coach, has already seen virtually every finish you could care to imagine, and from both perspectives.
So when Triumbari’s kick missed the mark, somewhere in his vast inner CV, there had to be a stirring of the 2017 Canada West championship final his ‘Birds played against the Dinos at Calgary’s McMahon Stadium.
And on that day, the hero wore hometown red.
Niko DeFonte, with the stakes so much higher than this past Friday, booted a 59-yard walk-off field goal to send Calgary to a 44-43 win over UBC and a berth in the national semifinals.
To this day, it remains the longest field goal in U SPORTS history.
“It hasn’t hit me yet, I guess,” a stunned Nill told me eight years ago over the phone following that game. “Your season is over, and that’s what’s bothering me. We did a lot of good things but not enough of them.”
On Friday, they did just enough of them. Everything mattered. Everything counted.
And it all adds up to a reprieve.
With a 2-2 record and four more games remaining, UBC has survived the first half of its season… and by by the hair of its collective chin. Now, it’s a fresh slate to open the second half this Friday on road against Alberta.
Just like that, it seems, everything is once again possible.
HERE’S TO FORCED FUMBLES, PICKS AND RECOVERIES!
From a UBC perspective, this was not the kind of game whose psyche would have refused a spit shine to reveal its true sheen.
Instead, this was 0ne marinated in grease.
The numbers, like Calgary’s 400-225 yard advantage in total yards gained, belied the final outcome.
If you had only the box score to go by, you’d have been fooled by numerical trickeration because UBC won a game in which its two quarterbacks — Derek Engel and Drew Viotto — combined to pass for just 143 yards, and one which all of three of its touchdowns came along the ground from no further than three yards out.
Yet if your appreciation for the game includes a recognition of just how vital the less-ballyhooed moments of a game really are, then this one stuffed the stat sheet.
The narrative heading in for a UBC team which had lost its last two games by an average margin of nearly four touchdowns and had allowed 200-plus yards of rushing in all three of its previous games this season was that unless its defence experienced a complete hallelujah, about-face, the season seemed ready to end with not much more than a whimper.
Yet while there is still a lot of work to be done, it’s clear the unit’s biggest step forward came Friday.
Afterwards, to a man, UBC defenders admitted Friday was no ordinary night.
“Going into the game, it was a playoff mentality,” said Brown, the second-year standout from Brampton. “If we didn’t get the win, we wouldn’t have gone to the playoffs. So it was putting our heads down, focussing up and all hats to the ball.”
The focus was so pronounced that what Brown later spoke to transpired during Calgary’s first drive of the game.
On the Dinos’ third snap, deep in their own end, UBC rush end Deacon Sterna’s penetration into the Calgary backfield resulted in a quarterback pressure and forced fumble by Jordan.
Dynamic front-seven hybrid Clark Leonard, the third-year Ottawa native, recovered the ball at the Calgary one-yard line to set up a one-yard Viotto keeper for a 7-0 lead.
Yet sandwiched between that play and Brown’s improbable fourth-quarter interception were two other massive plays by the UBC defence, plays which literally snatched 14 points out of the hands of the Dinos.
On the first, Calgary’s Jordan went deep for receiver Vincent Paquette, but the poise UBC’s 18-year-old halfback Jehovany Batalonga showed to make an adjustment and explode on the ball to pick it off at his own five-yard line was one of the defence’s best moments of the season.
Later, with 2:18 left in the first half and the game tied 7-7, Calgary was driving for the go-ahead score on second-and-goal from the UBC four-yard line when veteran Ben Sangmuah came up and punched the ball out of the hands of Dinos running back Jabreel Yahaya at about the two-yard line. Leonard’s nose for the ball went to another level as he fell on it in the end zone for his second fumble recovery of the game.
When you consider it in its entirety, the Sterna forced fumble and the Brown interception led directly to 10 UBC points, while the Batalonga interception and the Sangmuah forced fumble prevented 14.
“One hundred per cent we took it personally, and mainly because we are a family,” said UBC linebacker Isaiah Cooper when asked if the chatter, not unwarranted based on the past few week’s lack of production, had poked a little too hard at their pride.
Cooper was credited as being a part of a team-high 13 tackles on the night, including four solo stops. And there were so many others who brought that same mentality, including the likes of Kinsale Philip, Chase Henning, Malcolm Fraser, Tyson Lewis and Maka Bangura among others.
“We took it as an opportunity to prove people wrong,” added Cooper. “This was the kind of must-have that we needed to turn our entire season around.”
THE CHEMISTRY OF VICTORY
As the fans filtered out of Thunderbird Stadium on Friday night, a wise and trusted voice in the press box found the perfect place to rank the game within the best home-field finishes in recent memory, calling it “…the most exciting game since the 2023 Hardy Cup championship game.”
No one was doubting that the stakes were infinitely higher back on Nov. 18 of that season when UBC spent its final 52 seconds to cover 95 yards in six plays, culminating with Garrett Rooker’s sublime 13-yard scoring toss in the end zone to Sam Davenport on the final play of the game, a drive capped by Flannery-Fleck’s point-after kick in a 28-27 win over Alberta.
Yet based on where this season’s UBC team was headed, you couldn’t have convinced anyone on the 2025 team that Friday night’s fight was about anything less.
Wake up Sunday morning and take one look at the Canada West standings and the soundness of the ‘Birds collective mindset is immediately apparent.
In a tight-as-a-drum pack in the battle for a top-four finish, Saskatchewan and Regina sit locked at 3-1 atop the table. Then, in a three-way deadlock at 2-2 sit UBC, Calgary and Manitoba. Alberta brings up the rear at 0-4.
UBC has games remaining against both Saskatchewan and Regina, as well as Alberta and Manitoba in the second half.
Those games against the Huskies and Rams will be tough, of course, and that made it all the more essential that UBC, from its perspective, to beat Calgary because those two teams do not face each other in the second half of the season.
Thus in the event Thunderbirds and Dinos finish in a two-way tie, UBC will own the tiebreaker.
And with all of that in mind, Nill was having a hard time even attempting to underplay the importance of Friday’s final outcome.
“You bet man, if we lose that game, we’re basically out of the playoffs unless we have two underdog wins (over the Huskies and Rams) because we would have lost a tiebreaker to Calgary,” he confirmed.
As opposed to what it could have been with a loss, these UBC Thunderbirds held their collective breath Friday night and watched the opposition’s walk-off field goal attempt on the final play of the game sail wide left.
In anyone’s book, including theirs, that is the textbook example of a reprieve.
And so for a team whose veteran core seems just now set to be joined by its rising core of future stars, there is a strange feeling of alchemy in the air.
Yes, alchemy. I even looked it up in the dictionary just to make sure.
Alchemy: The medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metals into gold or to find a universal elixir.
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