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And in the time it took for all that to play out, before his roommate limped into the tunnel just as the Huskies gathered for warm-up, Linklater resolved that they would win.

“I was not afraid of Carleton. I was not scared one bit. I wasn’t worried about the outcome, because I knew the outcome was going to be us winning,” Linklater recalled recently. “If you go back and watch the tape, once the game was finished there was no celebration, because we knew that we were going to win, and that we were going on to win the championship.

“That’s the mentality you have to go into playing Carleton with. If you have any doubt — ‘Ooh, we could lose this game’ — it will really affect you.”

Photo by Darren Brown / Postmedia Network

Carleton, of course, is the Canadian men’s basketball dynasty that refuses to wither. The Ravens have charged the court in celebration in 13 of the last 15 national championship finals, including streaks of five and seven in a row. As their 2017-18 season begins this week, it is all too easy to take their astonishing run for granted, to view a 14th title in 16 years as a foregone conclusion.

Remember the part about Saskatchewan being the last team to beat them at nationals? That happened March 20, 2010, seven full seasons ago.

“We’d like to say we’re a perennial contender for the championship,” said James Derouin, who has coached the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees since 2010-11. “But there seems to be only one team getting the championship.”

Yet even as they’ve lorded over university hoops at the national level, the Ravens have shown flashes of vulnerability close to home. They have not won three of the last four Ontario conference titles; those have gone to Ottawa (2014) and the Ryerson Rams (2016 and 2017), where Derouin and Roy Rana have cultivated elite programs of their own — with everything to show for it except their game’s ultimate prize.