When he looks back on it, Luke Tasker admits he may have taken it for granted. When you’re in the moment, it’s hard not to.

“Dan Marino played in a Super Bowl and lost in his (second) year. He never played in it again,” Tasker said.

“The fifth game I’d started (in the CFL) was the Grey Cup. It was crazy. We played in it and lost bad in Saskatchewan. Then the next year we went back and lost a heartbreaker in Vancouver to Calgary.”

We’re in the early stages of lunch at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Toronto. A few seconds earlier, Tasker fearlessly reached for the hot sauce in the skull-shaped bottle (note: there’s a reason that one sauce is in a skull-shaped bottle) and sprinkled it on his food. Between bites, he warns that the hot sauce is in fact, very hot.

“But there was, I was 20…let’s see, I would have been…I was 22-years old playing in my first Grey Cup, 23 in my second one. I couldn’t have said this at the time but I do think there was a thought in my mind that, ‘We’ll get another chance at this thing, right?’ Not realizing how hard it is to get to the Grey Cup, let alone win.”

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That, of course, was four long years ago.

As he has just about every year since he joined the Ticats in 2013, Tasker’s doing his part to ensure that they can get back on that national stage and try to end the city’s now 18-year Grey Cup drought. The speedy, tough receiver is closing in on his third 1,000-plus-yard season. With four games left on the schedule, he’s got a good shot at surpassing the career-best 1,167 yards he posted a year ago.

The Ticats are 7-7 and with a strong finish could still match the organization’s hopes of an 11-win season. For the first time since 2015, before Zach Collaros went down with a knee injury, the Tiger-Cats are seen as a Grey Cup contender. From that abbreviated rookie season in 2013 to now, Tasker has had a fast-forward version of the highs and lows of the CFL roll out in front of him.

It starts with the man that introduced him to the CFL and who was a key figure in his college career, Kent Austin.

“I was not recruited by Kent,” Tasker said. “Jim Knowles was the head coach and he’s now at Duke University. For my freshman spring ball though, Kent brought in the whole staff, so I was with him for 3.5 years of my four years at Cornell.

“I was with Kent from when I was 19 until I was 26-years old. Really, my CFL career would not have started off like it did, or have been what it was without Kent and the trust that he put in me with the opportunity he gave me. I owe a lot to him.”

While Tasker was finishing up a communications degree with a minor in business at Cornell, he was exploring his options as an undrafted free agent in the NFL. When San Diego looked at him and passed, Austin invited him up to Hamilton. There were differences, like getting used to the waggle, but the offence felt very similar to what he’d been a part of in college. It wasn’t easy, but working with Austin and Tommy Condell felt familiar. He had 13 catches in three games for 202 yards and a touchdown in 2013 and grew that to 72 catches, 937 yards and five touchdowns in 2014.

They looked like they could be headed to their third-consecutive Grey Cup in 2015, before Collaros’ knee and his team’s fortunes both went sideways. The Ticats went 10-8 in 2015 and lost in the East Final to Ottawa. A year later, with Collaros still recovering, they were 7-11 and lost in the East semi-final to a crossover Edmonton team. They bottomed out in 2017, starting 0-8. Austin was replaced as head coach by June Jones and Collaros was benched in favour of Jeremiah Masoli.

“It is the fate of a coach’s career for him to…for things to change. It’s the fate of a player to get cut or traded. You know? Or to get injured,” he said.

“These things just don’t last the way you wish they would. It was inevitable. Knowing it was inevitable, I just owe so much to the chance that Kent gave me. Such is the football life.”

Through that horrible start — in the dregs of those blowout losses and continuous heartbreaking defeats, people wondered if they would win a game last year — the Ticats found life. Despite his relative lack of CFL experience, Jones was just what that team needed. They went 6-10 to close out the year, kind-of-sort-of flirted with the playoffs and managed to create hope for the future.

“June, or anyone else if you start off 0-8, it’s not going to be a happy environment, it’s not going to be an easy thing to overcome. Being 0-8 June was kind of free to let it fly a little bit,” Tasker said.

“That being said, he also has a very relaxed mannerism. He has this relaxed mentality that I think was a little contagious at the time because we were kind of in desperation mode. It was easy for us to cling on to.”

Jones was able to put his stamp on the coaching staff through the offseason, with the most notable addition coming at defensive coordinator, where Jerry Glanville came aboard. Glanville was the Houston Oilers’ coach when Tasker’s father, Steve started his NFL career there in 1985 and 1986.

“He said that Jerry just wants to have fun,” Tasker said of his father’s advice on his coaches for the season. “If you’re not going to have fun he doesn’t want you around. He was only there a year-and-a-half with him but it’s an interesting circle-of-life thing.”

He’s only 27, but Tasker has a greater understanding of that circle now. He and his wife, Jen, a music teacher that he met while in college, have a nine-month-old son at home in Buffalo. He lives in Hamilton during the season and one of the two of them commute to the other when they have days off. He hopes that there are still at least a few years of football in front of him, but there are a lot of other things in the world that capture his attention in the offseason.

He majored in communications at Cornell thinking he’d follow in his dad’s footsteps and go into sports media, but he says he’s not enough of a fan when he’s not one of the players to go that route. He likes the idea of coaching but doesn’t like the transient lifestyle that comes with it (“Even the great football coaches have been fired 12 times in their career, right?” he says).

He and Jen bought a now 118-year-old home in South Buffalo in 2014. The years-long renovation that came with it — it’s close but not finished quite yet — has piqued his interest in a possible career in real estate.

He hopes, though, that those decisions are still far off on the horizon. There’s a season to finish out and a genuine belief that he and his teammates will get to Edmonton this year to play for the Grey Cup. He knows now that those opportunities are fleeting, no matter how good your team is. Nov. 26 is just one day and you have one chance to seize it if you’re lucky enough to get there.

“Another chance at that, and a win in the Grey Cup would mean a lot to me,” he said.

“I realize now since then, we’ve had seasons where we’ve played great and it didn’t work out. It’d be huge.”