It has been a world junior hockey championship gold medal a long time in the making for Dylan Garand of Langford.
“It has been on my mind every day since the silver medal [2021 gold-medal game loss to the U.S.],” said the Island goaltender.
Garand was outstanding in backstopping Canada to the 2022 gold medal, culminating with the 3-2 overtime victory over Finland in the final over the weekend in Edmonton.
“It’s has been a long journey,” said Garand.
And a strange one as Garand played in the two most surreal world junior championships in history. Or was it three world tournaments? It’s all become a pandemic blur.
The first was in front of no fans in the bubbled 2021 tournament in Edmonton and the second in the troubled 2022 tournament that began last winter before being called off mid-stride because of a COVID breakout and postponed to a bizarre August date and amid the Hockey Canada sexual abuse scandals that hung over the whole thing. As a result, only a very small handful of fans turned out for the games in the cavernous NHL rink but the tournament was salvaged by a final crowd of more than 13,000 for the gold-medal game, which was still far from capacity at Rogers Place, and far off what a normal world junior championship in Canada would draw in the facility.
“I was not disappointed [in the turnouts] — it’s the middle of summer — and it got better and better with each game,” said Garand.“The [small] number of fans who came out for the earlier games were all supportive. And it built to being pretty electric in the building for the gold-medal final.”
With his junior career now over, the graduate of the Kamloops Blazers of the Western Hockey League is preparing for the New York Rangers rookie camp, which opens Sept. 13. The Juan de Fuca Minor Hockey Association product was a fourth-round draft pick of the Rangers and is signed to an entry-level NHL contract.
Hopefully, nobody will have to go through what Garand and his class did through their pandemic pock-marked junior careers. Asked if he has any advice for the 16- or 17-year-olds entering high-end junior hockey, he said: “Just keep working and not worrying about the future. That will take care of itself.”
It did for Garand, despite all the weirdness.
