Fan convinced 'miracle,' good-luck charm will help Elks snap record CFL home losing skid

Do you believe in miracles?

Guy Desrosiers does, and he believes history will repeat itself Thursday night at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium as the city’s football team tries to exorcise a devil of a losing skid.

The city resident has dug up a good luck charm of sorts to unleash when the winless Edmonton Elks taste certain victory, he says.

The last time the Elks (0-5) won a home game, the COVID-19 virus was a mere glimmer in a scientist’s eye. Now the Canadian Football League franchise faces extending its record 19-game losing skid on home turf to 20 Thursday night when they host the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

The game represents the Elks' best chance to snap the unfortunate slump that dates back to October 2021. Heading into the 7 p.m. contest, the Ticats sit in the basement of the CFL’s East Division with a record of 1-3. Hamilton is without its top quarterback, Bo Levi Mitchell, who is injured and out of the lineup.

Beyond the prospect of perhaps defeating a fellow CFL bottom-feeder, though, the 66-year-old Desrosiers – a lifelong fan – believes the unusual result of the Elks’ previous game is a sign the team’s fortunes are about to change.

The 12-11 Saskatchewan Roughriders victory over the Elks was a score Desrosiers has seen just one time before: at Edmonton’s old Clarke Stadium on a rainy September 1971 night, when the team snapped an eight-game losing slide by beating the Montreal Alouettes.

“If there are more than two 12-11 scores in the history of the CFL, I can’t find them,” he said.

To him, it’s a sure sign the Elks' fortunes will change. The 1971 victory by the then 1-10 team, you see, was the start of a five-game win streak to end the season. That success was followed by a gridiron renaissance for the gang in Green and Gold: the team went on to make the playoffs in 1972 and to the Grey Cup finals in ‘73 and ’74 before winning the championship in ’75.

“That’s the beginning and the end,” said Desrosiers, who was 14 years old when Edmonton won the 1971 game in question. “That’s where the dynasty started … A brand new dynasty starts tonight.”

That dynasty of CFL lore is the one that began with that 1975 Grey Cup victory. Edmonton went on to win five in a row from 1978-82 and collected four more league titles before ending their record 35 straight years of playoff appearances in 2006.

Guy Resrosiers, second from left, and his three friends in 1971, to this day all diehard Edmonton football fans.To curry favour with the football gods, Desrosiers plans to bring a banner he and his Grade 9 pals unfurled to the delight of the Clarke crowd during that fateful win over the Alouettes more than half a century ago.

When the game ends, he and one of his accomplices from 1971 plan to head to field level and open up the banner: an old pink bed sheet a young Desrosiers ‘borrowed’ from his mother to print the words ‘You Have Witnessed A Miracle’ in felt pen, a task that took him two days to complete.

Elks head coach Chris Jones said he and his players appreciate any encouragement fans may offer and that players would undoubtedly see such a banner.

“We appreciate our fans, no doubt. We don’t like the situation we’re in,” Jones said at practice on Wednesday. “We certainly don’t like the situation we have here at home, and we’re doing everything in our power to make sure that we reverse that.

“We’ve put a lot of work in to try to get there. Anything that we can get (from) the fans' side, we’re all for it.”

Desrosiers found the banner in his home recently, and it didn’t take him long to track down the good-luck charm, perhaps another sign victory is close.

He discovered it inside an old steamer trunk and, after wiping off "decades of dust," opened it to reveal – underneath old high-school gym shorts and a collection of T-shirts – the "pink glow" of the banner.

Think a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style reveal, if you will.

“As soon as I walked into the storage room, you could feel it,” said Desrosiers, who predicts an Elks' Grey Cup win this season. “It was summoning me.”

with files from CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson