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From one extreme to another, there isn’t much Ryan Phillips hasn’t gone through with the B.C. Lions.

He’s won Grey Cups. He’s also been part of blowout playoff losses that have ushered in coaching changes and set the franchise back both in terms of the on-field product and with the paying customer. One extreme manifests into the golden standard of the CFL. The other can make that standard seem agonizingly far away.

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“My first few years, we were always the most dominant. I’ll tell you, my first four or five years, I was spoiled,” said Phillips on Tuesday. “Sometimes, if we won 11 games (in a season), it was a down year. If we weren’t in first place, it was a down year. If we weren’t in the West final, we were looked at as, ‘What’s going on? Are they now starting to plummet?’”

The Lions did eventually plummet.

A year ago, they were about to lose the West semifinal to the Calgary Stampeders. They didn’t know it yet, but defeat to a superior ball club was imminent, no matter what Andrew Harris — now with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers — said or how peeved he got with TSN prognosticators for dismissing the chances of Jeff Tedford’s group days in advance of its playoff showdown in Calgary.