Sept 29th, 2001: Sooners 16, Jr. Riders 15 (OT)

By broadening my search, I've now managed to track down all the Jr. Riders results from 1997 to 2001 inclusively. The Gazette newspaper from Montreal was very helpful in nailing down the few missing scores that had eluded me until last night.

There were a few game summaries added as well, though many are just a single paragraph rundown of the players who scored. Some weren't even that detailed, they were essentially a confirmation of the score, the team's place in the standings, and their next opponent. I didn't bother copying those.

There is a discrepancy that I can't seem to figure out though; The official standings I've seen for that season display the Riders at 6-1-1 but...I can't find a tie among their results. The closest is the game below which even mentions that the Riders were 4-2 as a result of that overtime loss against the Sooners. 

My guess is that this game was misidentified as a tie by someone.

The Sooners would win another one-point game against the Jr. Riders in the Manson Cup, after which the Jr. Riders moved to the Ontario Football Conference on the Canadian Junior League. More on that later but for now, their first era is about as fully recorded here as it's going to be. 

As for the Sooners, I'd started to wonder about the state of their big comeback because they'd been so quiet since the announcement but they returned to social media this past week, including a new Instagram account.

I find the hashtags used encouraging here. They appear to be aiming to restore teams at the varsity level (OSFL, Ontario Summer Football League) and senior/semi-pro (NFC, Northern Football Conference) as well as their standard junior club. I thought they might focus on the junior club initially then expand from there but that doesn't seem to be the case. It looks like steam ahead. Great news unless I'm making too much of a couple of hashtags.