Can you believe it’s already been five years since the Oilers cashed in on their pact with Satan to give them the lucky numbers needed to win the Connor McDavid lottery? It was on this day, back in April of 2015, that Bill Daly flipped over the golden ticket, revealing the Oilers logo as the future home of Connor McDavid and breaking the hearts of Leafs fans everywhere. What a glorious day.

Do you remember where you were when the news broke that the Oilers had won the lottery to end all lotteries? I certainly do. I was posted up on my couch, mostly ignoring the draft lottery as I had already resigned myself to thinking that the Oilers would take Dylan Strome or Noah Hanifin or something like that. Sure, I had Sportsnet on in the background just so that I could find out how things played out, but I never in a million years would have expected the Oilers to be the ones that pulled this clutch win out of their asses. With only an 11.5% chance to win, I had written off the idea entirely and felt like we had used all of our lottery luck over the three-straight drafts where the team picked up Hall, Nugent-Hopkins, and Yakupov. So when Daly flipped the golden ticket card over, signifying that we had won the opportunity to draft Connor McDavid, I thought I was going to lose it.

Not only did I have to rewind my PVR 33x to make sure what my eyes had just seen actually happened, but I also turned to Twitter to make sure that other people were talking about the same thing and that I hadn’t started hallucinating. I also remember Wanye calling me, screaming “OMFG WE WON! CONNOR MCDAVID!” before abruptly hanging up the phone and disappearing into a drunken fog. I didn’t even get a single word in on that conversation, but I knew exactly how he was feeling so it all seemed to make sense. Yeah, we had seen our team win draft lotteries before but there had been nothing quite like this. All that my feeble blogger brain could compute was that the Oilers were blessed with an opportunity that they couldn’t afford to waste, and that the Internet and hockey world at large was going to have a meltdown.

As always, the point of me doing this every year is not to re-live the lottery days but to make sure we all take a minute to remember how lucky we are to have Connor McDavid on the team, and to send a friendly reminder to the franchise that his career is a finite resource that deserves respect. This year would have been only the second time in five years that Connor was going to get into the playoffs, and with only 13 postseason games under his belt, we need management to remember not only today but every day how important it is to surround him with a team that can compete. Right now, it’s hard to describe how upsetting it is to not be able to watch 97 in the playoffs as he continues to build his resume as one of the best to ever do it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a few minutes to appreciate the moment he got here.

If you need a laugh, take a minute to watch the reaction video we put out after the draft lottery went down. As you see, we were all pretty excited about it. I mean, except for Steve Dangle, of course. Sorry, Dangle.