Headed into Grey Cup week, the quarterback storylines were clear: the kid vs. the savvy veteran. As we now know, with Davis Alexander re-aggravating the hamstring injury that cost him a significant portion of the CFL season, Trevor Harris ultimately got the better of that narrative.
Underneath it all, though, was another layer of the same apple: Was Alexander really going to get one before Harris as a starter? Calling that possibility “embarrassing” is a bridge too far, there’s nothing embarrassing about Harris’ career, his accuracy, his completion percentage, his journey, or his ability to supply whatever the locker room needs at any given moment across his CFL adventures.
The concept still made me uneasy, because I knew that if things went the other way on Sunday, we’d likely tear down Harris just as quickly as we’d built up Alexander and the Grey Cup champion Alouettes.
112th GREY CUP
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All of which has forced me to contemplate the idea of legacy over the last couple of weeks.
One definition describes legacy as “the long-lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc., that took place in the past, or of a person’s life.” In professional sports, football in particular, and especially when it comes to quarterbacks, legacy often gets boiled down to a single, blunt question: Did you win a ring or not?
Like that gnarly leftover piece of 2×4 that somehow finds its way into the campfire years after a project, nail still sticking out of it, as the heat rises, all that remains is the nail. The championship conversation becomes the thorn that outlasts everything else. It’s been that way for quarterbacks everywhere, and Harris has lived it for more than a decade north of the border.
In our current media climate, one that leans toward absolutism and oversimplification, every quarterback in the CFL can be painted as a failure in some shape or form because, here’s the catch, only one gets to lift the Grey Cup each year.
Bo Levi Mitchell has a couple, but ooooh those losses in 2016 and 2017, am I right? Zach Collaros helped end a Grey Cup drought in Winnipeg, but since 2021 there have been some lonely moments watching East Division clubs celebrate.
I could lay out every hole and pitfall in the way we talk about quarterbacks, but to me this is about how we choose to look at the game’s most important position, a position proven vital weekly by names like Mitchell, Collaros, and Harris, on a foundation built by the likes of Jackson, Moon, and Calvillo.
Trevor Harris walked straight into this modern monster of a topic during Grey Cup week and handled it expertly, brushing it aside in trademark fashion by focusing on what mattered, not what the other side of the Grey Cup coin might look like after another potential defeat.
He focused on what Montreal’s defence was doing, what they were giving him, and where he could exploit it. The result was a masterful performance emblematic of his CFL career at large, a showing that felt poetic, a microcosm of his maturation and sustained excellence over the years.
And now he reaps the rewards. No, I’m not talking about the late-night celebrations or the jewelry he’ll get to show off at every Saskatchewan event he and Darian Durant attend for the next 20 years as titans of the Green and White. I’m talking about the mental peace, clarity, and joy that come from knowing, forever, that he is a Grey Cup Champion.
Team wins aren’t a quarterback statistic in the ultimate team game, but Harris wouldn’t have enjoyed that level of understanding had he fallen to Montreal. Now he never has to engage with what that would have meant for his “legacy,” because he can sit back and smile for the rest of his life, looking back on that special night in Winnipeg when he finally led a team to a Grey Cup win.