Your midday sports snack. Toast points • The Argonauts had an additional passenger on their flight home from Ottawa this morning. Quarterback Ricky Ray carried the Grey Cup onto the tarmac at Toronto’s Pearson Airport hours after his team ripped the trophy from the waiting hands of the heavily favoured Stampeders. “The guys are pretty…

OTTAWA — When it was over, when the crowds had left TD Place to seek warmth and the field was covered with double-blue confetti mixed in with piles of snow, Marc Trestman said he was at a bit of a loss to explain that Grey Cup win. Dave Dickenson said the same, except much quieter.…

Alex Ovechkin, right, receives a certificate of recognition from President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2012. Photograph by: Sergei Karpukhin WASHINGTON — For more than a dozen years, Alex Ovechkin has skated between two worlds: his country of birth and his professional home. He’s beloved, cheered and revered in both. He regularly has tried to…

Spencer (left) and Scott McHaffie started coaching the Surrey Knights of B.C.’s Pacific Junior Hockey League midway through the 2016-17 season. Spencer McHaffie was a point-per-game forward in his playing days. He could shoot and pass and agitate, and he made himself intimately familiar with the penalty box. Mostly, he knew how to win: he…

OTTAWA — The 105th Grey Cup had a lot of things that reeked of Canadiana: a blizzard, snowplows, Shania Twain on a dogsled. But it was something else that was perfectly representative of a Canadian football championship game. It was a wild, ridiculous affair, one that the Calgary Stampeders thoroughly dominated and yet the Toronto…

Professional hockey was in trouble 100 years ago. World War I was raging in Europe. Conscription into Canada’s army threatened to take away more players, while forcing others into essential war work. Teams folded as more and more fans wondered why some fit, young men were dying overseas while others were playing games at home.…