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In the old days, the winner might have been decided by Sunday’s Western semifinal at B.C. Place, when O’Shea’s back-from-the-dead Blue Bombers play the back-from-retirement Buono’s resurgent Lions.

But … wait, what? Calgary’s Dave Dickenson is the Western nominee?

Photo by John Woods / THE CANADIAN PRESS Files

Buono, who has long since sealed the deal as the CFL’s winningest coach, says no one should be surprised.

“Coach of the year is Dave Dickenson, in my mind,” Buono said Thursday. “I don’t want to be disrespectful to Rick Campbell, but — and I’ve been there — I think sometimes people don’t appreciate the coach when you win all those games. They think it’s everybody else but you, but I tip my hat to Dave, to keep his team at that level even at the point when the games don’t mean anything.

“There’s only one other person I’ve spoken to who really understood. Don Matthews and I were talking a couple of years ago about how difficult it is to keep a team year in and year out at that level. I think you have to be in that boat. You get to a point where winning isn’t even fun any more, because the expectations are so high and the pressure becomes so huge, unless you win the Grey Cup, everyone thinks it’s a failure.

“So to have Dave go 15-2-1, I tip my hat to him because I know how hard it is.”

It’s true: too often the Stukus trophy — heck, any league’s coach of the year trophy — ends up going to the guy whose team makes the biggest turnaround from awful to not bad, or the coach who does the most with the least. So it’s arguably not a bad thing for a coach who kept a great team great to win it, for once.