Even though Panthers won, McDavid’s greatness is what we’ll be talking about for the foreseeable future

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A losing locker room is never a fun place, but the Edmonton Oilers’ room a half hour after they’d lost Monday’s Game 7 was a different order of disappointed.

Teary staffers lined the walls. One was slumped in a corner, weeping. The place was so still, you could clearly hear the lyrics to ‘We Are The Champions’ coming through two feet of concrete.

But no picture of desolation could compare to Connor McDavid.

When the game ended, he’d gone over to the bench to lay his head upon it. He may have had a little weep himself. He was the first person to jump into the handshake line and then he was gone.

He won the Conn Smythe in a losing cause, but refused to come out and accept it from commissioner Gary Bettman. He showed up to scrum in a state of dishevelment, a dirty towel wrapped around his head.

McDavid had literally played out of his socks in the 2-1 loss. His toes had torn through two layers of hosiery.

McDavid is never exactly chatty, but he’d reverted to monosyllabic.

Are you happy to win the Conn Smythe?

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(Long pause, a lot of head bobbing) “Yeah.”

Is this the most devastated you’ve been as an NHLer?

(A snort)

How hard is this?

“Guys who have won it say it’s tough,” McDavid said. He was either unaware of the irony or deeply so. It was hard to say.

Everyone’s unhappy when they lose, but typical pros pivot quickly to accentuating the positive. ‘The guys in this room’ and all that. Not McDavid and not on Monday. Several times he repeated, “We had our looks.”

His misery was beautifully counterpointed by the Florida Panthers’ delight in winning. At one point, Matthew Tkachuk, whose arrival in a trade from the Flames tipped Florida’s trajectory upward, said, “Shoutout to my fans in Calgary. You know I couldn’t let Edmonton win.”

Saying things like that has a way of coming back to bite you, but that’s this Florida team all over. They don’t do things the way things are done.

This is the same franchise that once warned local taxpayers that if they didn’t buy the team a new scoreboard, the old one was probably going to fall on them. Their mascot is a rat, for God’s sake.

There are model sports outfits and then there is the Panthers. Whatever this win is, it is first and foremost a victory for irony.

Both teams rode their luck and their goalies in this series. Since it’s an odd number of games, someone had to get the advantage of that. Once a puck slipped through Edmonton goalie Stuart Skinner in the second period, you felt Oilers’ had run out of both strains of luck. Like McDavid said, they had their chances. But they don’t sing songs about people who almost did something.

What Edmonton, the game of hockey and the country will remember out of this is McDavid’s emergence as a true national figure.

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There were echoes in this series of the last Oilers’ dynasty, the Wayne Gretzky-Mark Messier-Paul Coffey Oilers. They also lost their first Stanley Cup final, though that was a sweep. Everything they did afterward was in response to that letdown.

Until recently, McDavid’s story was one of disappointment. No matter how great he was, his team could not rise to match him.

Over the past two months, they did, and McDavid got even better. Gretzky only once scored more points than McDavid did in these playoffs. But look what he was working with, and look what McDavid’s got.

You can’t say that McDavid had the greatest playoffs ever, because he lost. But he was one goal and one game from making that a genuine debate.

Now that’s he’s nearly done it and it’s ended in ash, his next few years are reduced to a two-part plan. Do it again, but right this time.

Losers in pro sports are always talking about how you have to learn to win. It is hard to picture a better school than this series.

The good news? Just as he’s really arrived, aged 27, McDavid’s access points to mythology are multiplying.

In February, he will lead Canada’s very best for the first time, in the inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off. Is it a contrived event? Sure. That won’t matter to Canadians if Canada wins it.

Twenty months from now, he’ll be the betting favourite to carry the flag into the San Siro in the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony.

Right now, McDavid is still the guy who couldn’t catch a break. So good, and now so close, but nothing ever quite works out for him.

In less than two years, he could be up there on hockey’s Rushmore, garlanded like the top half-dozen legends of the game his ability deserves comparison with. Were it to happen, it would seem all the sweeter because it has been so long since a hockey player defined the national zeitgeist.

So while ‘Panthers win’ is today’s headline, ‘McDavid’s Canadian Revenge Tour’ is the one we’ll be talking about for the foreseeable future.

You don’t have to watch or play the game - and fewer Canadians do each year - to acknowledge that hockey is a fundamental characteristic of this country. That and clearing snow in an urban setting. Those are only two things we’re as good or better at than everyone else.

Canada’s current malaise is down to a million factors, but think back to the last time it felt like we were all in it together. It’s probably Vancouver 2010. A lot of people contributed to that, but Sidney Crosby deserves more credit than the rest. Is it fair to ask McDavid to put ‘revitalize the nation’ on his to-do list? Of course not. But he’s the person best positioned to give it a go.

That would still have been possible had the Oilers pulled the greatest comeback in hockey history on Monday night. But it would be neither as dramatic nor as satisfying if whatever comes next didn’t start from this moment, with this feeling.