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Even as a boy growing up in Oskee Wee Wee country, Marcel Desjardins was hooked on Ottawa football.

Desjardins was 10 when Rough Riders quarterback Tom Clements scrambled right and threw on the run to a wide-open Tony Gabriel in the end zone during the dying seconds of the 1976 Grey Cup game, Ottawa’s most recent fling with CFL glory.

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“My first recollection of football,” Desjardins says, “Clements to Gabriel. Tony was from Burlington. As a kid, you latch onto something like that. (The Rough Riders) became my team.”

In the 38 years that followed, the Riders died (1996) and were reborn as the Renegades (2002-05), rising now again in this 2014 revival as the Redblacks, a handle so perplexing that the team and three of the newspapers that cover it all use different variations of the nickname (REDBLACKS, Redblacks, RedBlacks, Rouge et Noir). Don’t even ask about the mascot.

Over the same four decades, long before he imagined being general manager of a newbie CFL team in Ottawa, Desjardins grew up in Aldershot, a chip shot away from the Burlington Golf and Country Club, attended school in Hamilton, studied radio broadcasting at Fanshawe College in London, earned a Bachelor of Commerce at Laurentian University (with a major in sports administration), interned for the OHL Sudbury Wolves, worked for the Canada Games Council, then the CFL head office co-ordinating player personnel matters from 1994-99.