It should come as little surprise that the best football player on the Saskatchewan Roughriders is also one of the best talkers on the team too.
The Riders hosted the Toronto Argonauts in a game that I thought would have been over before it started.
This is now the second Rider game I've ever been to and both games started the same way: Saskatchewan falls behind early by at least a touchdown.
Despite falling behind 9-0 through the opening quarter, they made a comeback and topped it off with an interception returned for a touchdown to seal a 30-20 win.
Even with the craziness of some professional football games, where momentum seems to be able to change in any given minute, the weirdest part was going to be post game interviews.
I knew enough about the team to ask a few things right off the bat, but the way things went there were about 15 other media there and instead of doing interviews in the hallway, it was more like a press conference.
I was writing down some things to talk to Ken Miller about, yet it was Darian Durant that would be the first one I'd see, and that was only because I followed everybody else.
It was kind of nerve-wracking because I only needed two minutes with the head coach. I had no idea where to find him.
LIttle did I know that there would be two long waits, one of them was long enough that I could have sent someone on a coffee run and still have plenty of time before they let us in.
We waited inside a room that was next door to the Riders locker room, then someone came into our room and let us in the Rider locker room.
It's not like I had any reason to doubt Durant's ability to give answers but he was even better than I thought.
Toronto's CFL team has never been known for playing so tight defensively, but they shut down Saskatchewan for nearly the entire first half.
I wasn't really thinking about what Durant might say but as it turned out, he couldn't say enough about Toronto's defensive system.
"They're a great defensive team. They took away some of the things we wanted to do. It wasn't pretty."
He was my first professional athlete interview since I helped cover the Hamilton Bulldogs of the American Hockey League just before moving to Yorkton. It was kind of weird. Experience rarely ever fails, but somehow I made the mistake of forgetting that I had that experience.
Durant also made a brilliant point of noting that since Toronto scored four field goals in the opening half, it actually worked to the Roughriders advantage. Had it been four touchdowns, they may have been off to the races by the half.
I think Durant was laughing at me after the scrum cleared away from his locker. My last question to him was 'Where do I find coach Miller?'
The only other thing he touched on was the playmaking ability of Chris Getzlaf and the chemistry between him and Getzlaf.
Following Durant (see picture on Page B17), I remember looking up and seeing a bunch of football players but no media. I had no idea where to go. I nearly walked in some guy's shower only because he wasn't courteous enough to close the curtain for himself.
One of the Rider staff obviously saw me walking down a hall and actually said to me "Find everything okay?" I couldn't, actually. I still had to find the coach.
That was the other thing I forgot from my Hamilton Bulldogs days; in the professional ranks they have some kind of code of conduct where you can talk to anyone you want but the head coach always comes last.
As it happens, 15-20 of us stood around a seated Ken Miller and started throwing questions at him from there. Some guy even came up to me with a 15-page list of statistics. What's weird is half of them say "page 1" at the bottom.
Just for the record, the only other thing I could think of was that the Saskatchewan Roughriders are now 2-0 at games that I attend.
If there's anything you'd like to see covered by Game 7, forward suggestions to the Yorkton This Week sportsdesk by phone (306) 782-2465, or email jeff@yorkton this week.com.
