ON THE ROAD BETWEEN CALGARY AND EDMONTON, Alberta — A white sedan trundled down a quiet road in Gasoline Alley, a tiny hamlet alongside Highway 2, with two flags flapping in a Saturday breeze. One fluttered for the Edmonton Oilers hockey club and the other for the Calgary Flames, two of the fiercest rivals in sports, waving from the windows of the same car.
Red Deer is the geographical midpoint between Alberta’s two major cities — Edmonton to the north and Calgary due south — and loyalties can be split “about 52-48 for the Oilers,” as calculated by a server at a local Tim Hortons doughnut shop. For some families — and their cars — it can be more like 50-50.
“I call Red Deer the fence,” he said. “When the Flames are good, it’s all red here. When the Oilers are good, it’s blue and orange.”
Now they are both good, and those colors are running white hot again. For the first time in 31 years, the Battle of Alberta is re-engaged in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the provincial adversaries are rumbling in a second-round encounter, boiling over with the heavy hits, trash talk, deafening arenas, bragging rights and bountiful goal scoring that defined hockey in the 1980s, when the Flames and Oilers played four postseason series.
“The intensity is as high as it gets,” said Lanny McDonald, the Hall of Fame winger, who grew up on a farm in Hanna, Alberta, east of Calgary, and played eight seasons with the Flames. “It’s bragging rights in sports, politics, culture, north vs. south, which side is better. We always think the South is better.”
The two cities quarrel over which has the better team, the juicier steak, the hipper restaurant row — even the superior library. At the moment, the meter tilts slightly toward Edmonton after the Oilers comfortably won Game 3 on Sunday, to take a 2-1 series lead.
After the game, Oilers fans poured onto the streets of Edmonton chanting, “We want the Cup,” while some climbed atop a statue of Wayne Gretzky, waving flags while car horns honked for over an hour afterward. Only the third game of the second round and it was hopping. This is the Battle of Alberta.
For decades, before the Flames and the Oilers even existed, the Alberta sports competitions were played out by club and lower-level professional hockey teams, in the local rodeos and through the Canadian Football League.
But this is the Stanley Cup playoffs and this is Canada, where five-dollar bills depict children playing pond hockey, and where the Battle of Alberta stamped the ’80s with thrilling games and rollicking punch-ups.
“That building was quite, quite loud tonight,” Oilers Coach Jay Woodcroft said after Game 3. Game 4 on Tuesday is expected to bring more of the same.
The shimmering Rogers Place, home of the most northern major sports team in the Americas, lies 186 miles north of the outdated Saddledome in Calgary, with Red Deer about 90 miles from each. But from every corner of Alberta, a stunning province of glacial lakes and the Rocky Mountains known for oil production, rolling prairies and cattle ranches, loyalties are torn, sometimes even within families.
For Game 1, Riaz Hamir wore a crisp, blue-and-orange Oilers jersey to the Saddledome, as did his 12-year-old daughter, Laila. But his wife, Shafali, and their 15-year-old son, Junyard, both wore Calgary red. A house divided.
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