KAKABEKA FALLS – Dylan Johnston never led the Northern Ontario Mixed Curling Championship finale until the last rock was thrown.
Until that moment his opponent, Kory Carr, hadn’t lost a game, led 3-0 and 4-1 at various points on Sunday afternoon at the Kakabeka Falls Curling Club, but found himself essentially stymied as he took the hack to throw his last rock.
Johnston was sitting shot stone and Carr’s only chance was to throw as much weight as he could muster and hope to untangle a trio of stones surrounding the button, two of them belonging to Johnston.
As soon as he let the shot go, Carr knew his fate was sealed.
Johnston was left with a steal of two and will represent Northern Ontario next November at the Canadian Mixed Curling Championship in St. Catharines, Ont., the top-seeded team pulling out an improbable 8-6 wins, scoring deuces in the final two ends to secure the triumph.
“It feels great,” Johnston said. “We struggled the first couple of ends. I missed a few shots, but we battled back and never gave up.”
The turning point came in the fifth.
The Johnston foursome, a lineup that includes lead Marcy Barry, second Chris Briand and third Samantha Morris, had hammer, but did not have shot rock and had to navigate a mass of stones of both colours in the rings.
Johnston put a little extra weight on his shot and somehow kicked both of Carr’s stones out of harm’s way, his shooter stopping in the rings to score three, tying the match 4-4.
Carr got a deuce back in the sixth but couldn’t make a tough double in the seventh and left Johnston a draw for two to tie the match.
“My heart was definitely racing,” Morris said, the match coming down to the, her team forced to manufacture a steal in the eighth end to pull out the victory.
“Dylan made some amazing shots in the couple of last ends there to really keep us in it. It was a bit of grind. We were ranked first going into it and didn’t have the results we wanted the first couple of games, but we grinded back that C-side and it really paid off having that much more ice time. We knew how to manage the rocks better.”
Carr had waltzed to the final, downing Mike Assad in the A-side final on Friday night.
Johnston’s route was a little more circuitous, losing to Zach Warkentin in a B-side match, meaning they had to win three straight to get to the semifinal, then edged Warkentin 5-2 earlier on Sunday to make the championship match.
It wasn’t an easy win, but Johnston and his team made the shots when they mattered most.
“They were playing so well so we had to hope for a couple of misses here or there, which they didn’t really give us,” Morris said.
