Tom Keca grew up watching the Oil Barons play. More than anyone, he knows how passionate the community can get about a winning team. As much as it’s an Oil Town, Fort Mac is a hockey town. Keca played minor hockey in the Casman Centre. It was where the team would meet before embarking on those gruelling road trips to games as far as seven hours away, with his dad behind the bus wheel, because no teams would agree to come to Fort McMurray to play. It was where he first dreamed of being an Oil Baron. And where he fulfilled that goal, pulling a blue and gold sweater over his head for a single season 25 years ago. It was the place where he first followed his path in the game, returning as an assistant coach, a position he held for a decade before opportunity moved the family nearly six hours away to Lloydminster when a head coaching job opened up. He and his wife, Erin, did their best to get settled there. But it wasn’t home. And after three years away, they returned to Fort McMurray and Keca went back to being an assistant. And when he finally got the chance to take over as head coach before the 2015–16 season, it was a dismal failure.

Last May, not two months removed from that first 10-win campaign, he sat in his office reviewing recruits who might be selected by a rival American league on what had been a crystal-clear, blue-sky morning. The fire burning through the forest just outside of town was under control now, he assumed. The smoke from a day earlier had cleared. The blaze was moving west, away from the city. It wasn’t even on his mind. Then Spiers, the trainer, bolted in.

Across the parking lot at the Casman Centre, above the row of homes on the street where Keca lived as a teenager, the sky was flooded with rising streaks of orange and grey. From his view in the enclave of Thickwood Heights, it looked like everything to the south was on fire. The wind had brought the blaze rushing back towards the city. It had jumped the Athabasca River — a gap of about 200 m — and burned through the Fort McMurray Golf Club and the forest beyond it, moving towards Thickwood like a line of lit gunpowder.