Can you believe it’s been four years since the Oilers summoned the dark Gord to give them the luck needed to win the Connor McDavid lottery? It was on this day, back in 2015, that Bill Daly flipped over the golden ticket, showing the Oilers logo as the future home of Connor McDavid.

Do you remember where you were when Bill Daly flipped over the golden ticket? I do. I was sitting on my couch, ignoring the draft lottery entirely as I had already sold myself on Dylan Strome or Noah Hanifin being the next Oiler come draft day. Yeah, I had the TV in the background but I wasn’t really paying attention, ya know? With only an 11.5% chance to win the McLottery, there was no way on Gord’s green earth that I believed we’d be lucky enough to land the best prospect the NHL has seen since Crosby came out of Rimouski. So when Daly turned over the Oilers logo, signifying that we had won the chance to draft Connor, I completely lost my shit.

I remember rewinding my PVR and re-watching the lottery 15x before I was finally able to convince my brain that I had actually seen what I thought I did. I remember Wanye calling me, screaming “OMG WE WON! CONNOR MCDAVID!” into the phone before abruptly hanging up and disappearing into the night. For me, the idea that the Oilers had won the most important draft lottery that they possibly could have seemed so unlikely that when it actually happened, I didn’t know how to act or what to do with my hands. Yeah, we’ve won draft lotteries before but nothing quite like this. All I knew for sure was that the Oilers were blessed with an opportunity that they couldn’t afford to waste, and that the Internet was going to meltdown.

The point of writing this article again this year is not to brag about our lottery prowess but to remember how lucky we are to have Connor McDavid on our team, and also to offer a reminder to the franchise that his career is a finite resource that needs to be respected. If anything, having four years pass with only 13 playoff games under his belt is unacceptable and an indictment on the job done by the management group that seems to still think they’re the smartest ones in the room. We cannot go through another year of wasting his time, and the pressure is on to make the changes needed to get him back in the postseason where he belongs. Gord knows Connor deserves better than what he’s gotten so far.

Happy Connorversary, Nation. Here’s to many more.

Sometimes I like to look back at the comments section after we had won the lottery just to see how elated everyone was, and I can’t help but laugh. We all had so much fun that night and I desperately want this team to get back to a time when we can all feel this way again. Connor deserves it, we deserve it, and the city of Edmonton deserves it as well. Here’s to MISSION20 happening next spring.