Things I remember most about working Jets-Leafs games in Winnipeg through the years:

1) Burton Cummings playing the national anthem on piano at old Winnipeg Arena (I’m a huge Guess Who fan).

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

2) John Ferguson Sr.’s big fists pounding the walls of his private box when the GM was mad, shaking the entire press row. Eventually they tinted the window so people couldn’t see him rant.

3) Outdoor digital temperatures displayed around Portage and Main hovering around Jim Korn’s minus numbers as a Leaf.

4) Fans yelling “True North!” during O, Canada at Bell MTS Place, even those who had dug out their Ballard-era Leafs jerseys for the night.

5) The wonderfully sardonic bartender at Bailey’s near the Fairmont Hotel, always keen to talk hockey when the Leafs or Marlies are in town.

And the Jets themselves? It’s covering another Canadian team with a loyal fan base yet to get to the Stanley Cup final in decades.

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Since their WHA heyday — when I’m told even the writers got to drive around town with the Avco Cup in their trunk — it has been a shared misery of great expectations and great players that ran into better clubs, mixed with some forgettable seasons and dressing-room soap operas.

In tracking both incarnations of the Jets, seeing Manitoba in late spring remains just a rumour, although the locals insist it’s nice.

Perhaps this is the year when Patrik Laine, Mark Scheifele, Blake Wheeler, Big Buff, Connor Hellebuyck and the gang dig in. And if pre-season prognostications have merit, they could end up meeting Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Mitch Marner and the Leafs in the long dreamt-for all-Canadian final that will have TV types salivating. Two meetings this week, spread over four days, might be that preview.

But we digress.

“For years, I’d go to the Gardens when the Jets came and easily get scalpers’ tickets,” said ’Peg-born Jim Slotek, former Sun entertainment columnist and part of a Gemini-nominated writing team for the NHL awards show in the early ’90s.

“B.J. Del Conte, who worked at the Winnipeg and Toronto Sun, and I could get a pair of greens for $120 face-value each, a lot less if we waited until the game had just started. They weren’t a draw in Toronto like, say, the Bruins were.

“Then you’d see a game in Winnipeg, where the Jets had some strong teams at times, with wonderful support.

“I was from that generation that watched games in the old Arena with the giant picture of Queen Elizabeth at one end. But the fans were always split, half-Toronto or half-Canadiens, the irony being those times of general ugliness when Winnipeg wanted in the NHL and was denied.”

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Jonathan Jenkins, a former Winnipeg Sun journo, Queen’s Park reporter and co-founder of the Newsapalooza charity concert of Toronto’s media rock bands, always wore his Jets sweater on stage at The Opera House with The Screaming Headlines before his passing in 2014. He was part of a transplanted core that kept the first Jets’ memory alive in Toronto and from sea-to-sea.

There actually was one Winnipeg-Toronto Cup final, won by the former, in January of 1902. The Winnipeg Victorias, named for the reigning royal, defeated the Ontario Hockey Association champion Toronto Wellingtons in two games by 5-3 scores on home ice. Game reports were sent back to Toronto via railway telegraph.

That series was notable for the Wellingtons wearing Winnipeg’s alternate sweaters in Game 1 for some never-explained reason and for the nine-man Victorias losing the Cup just two months later in a challenge by the Montreal Athletic Association. Then came two junior Memorial Cups for Winnipeg, head-to-head against the GTA, the Rangers and Monarchs beating the Oshawa Generals and St. Michael’s Majors in the mid-1940s.

Winnipeg had to wait a few decades until it next came to hockey prominence via the WHA. Bobby Hull’s record $1-million deal in their second season of 1972-73 angered the NHL establishment — led by Harold Ballard — and got the Golden Jet booted off Team Canada while truly stirring anti-Eastern sentiment.

Hull inspired two other 100-point players, Christian Bordeleau and Norm Beaudin, but the big bang was a year later, when the Nordic invasion of Lars-Erik Sjoberg, Anders Hedberg, Ulf Nilsson, Veli Pekka-Ketola and Heikki Riihiranta occurred. Hedberg and Nilsson were scouted by the Leafs at the same time as that region opened to the NHL, but Toronto settled for its first big find, Borje Salming.

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

“Hedberg and Nilsson would have been great in any league,” Slotek said. “You watched them and the Jets play exhibition games against Russians or NHLers and it was incredible.”

Winnipeg was close to Ground Zero of the contentious merger talks in the late 1970s. Ballard’s fanatical opposition, centring around the loss of TV revenue, led to boycotts of Molson Brewery products (the owners of the Canadiens and sponsor of the Leafs) in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Quebec City. A bullet fired through the window of the Molson plant in Winnipeg also got everyone’s attention in the corporate towers.

But when the union did go through, the one-sided peace terms saw the Jets stripped of their best assets, while the Oilers were able to retain Wayne Gretzky in their division. Three of the Jets’ top six scorers were gone, while Scott Campbell, whom they protected, developed asthma because of the extreme cold.

“That grudge against the NHL still continues,” laughed Slotek. ”I’ve got a good friend from there and you hardly mention Toronto before he starts spouting off about how he hates the Leafs and the East.”

The Jets did develop all-star Dale Hawerchuk, a Calder winner and Hart Trophy runner-up, as well as Thomas Steen, and usually featured a high-scoring defence into the early 1990s.

Teemu Selanne set the league afire with 76 goals in 1992-93. Yet it wasn’t enough to keep them in town, when the U.S. dollar became the coin of the NHL realm and their antiquated home rink couldn’t generate the millions needed for survival. They were off to sunny Phoenix in 1996.

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

“There was so much defeatism around the Jets before they moved,” said Slotek. “I bought one more sweater near the end of their last year and the guy at the store threw in a pair of reds for the game.

“The worst part was they went the same route the Hartford Whalers did to Carolina, to another place where hardly anyone cares about hockey. They’re still struggling to make a go of it in Arizona all these years later.”

Canadian director Guy Maddin’s “docufantasia” entitled My Winnipeg was released in those Jets-barren years, with allusions to the team and scenes of the Arena being imploded.

Today’s Jets are not on thin ice. True North Sports and Entertainment made a success of the AHL’s Manitoba Moose at MTS Centre and had enough money to try to buy back the team from Arizona, eventually purchasing the Atlanta Thrashers in 2011.

The Jets name and colours stayed, the logo changed, but many traditions were revived, such as the home crowd’s playoff White-Out.

Will some blue be visible in June as well?

LEAFS-JETS CONNECTIONS

Jets who became Leafs and vice-versa (prior to Winnipeg moving to Arizona in 1996-97)

General managers: Mike Smith

Coaches: Randy Carlyle, Tom Watt, Dan Maloney, Terry Simpson, Paul Maurice.

Notable players: Nik Antropov*, Lucien DeBlois, Laurie Boschman, Randy Carlyle, Tie Domi, Dave Ellett, Kris King, Dave Manson, Ed Olczyk, Igor Korolev, Mark Osborne.

*Played for the new Jets, beginning in 2011-12.

PROMINENT MANITOBA-BORN LEAFS

Goalies: Ed Belfour, Turk Broda, Terry Sawchuk, Ken Wregget, James Reimer

Defencemen: Bill Juzda, Jim Thomson

Forwards: Andy Bathgate Ken Baumgartner, Andy Blair, Jerry Butler, Bill Derlago, ‘Wild’ Bill Ezinicki, Cal Gardner, Pete Langelle, Eric Nesterenko, Colton Orr, Wally Stanowski, Pete Stemkowski

Head coach: Billy Reay

FATHERS AND SONS

John Ferguson and John Ferguson Jr. (Leafs GM)

Brent and Carter Ashton

Thomas and Alex Steen