I walked into TD Place as the snow began to fall on Sunday evening, tiny flakes dancing against the stadium lights. The air stung with a particular kind of November cold that seeps through layers, the kind of night when breath hangs visible for seconds. Yet 24,000 fans packed the stands, their red-and-blue scarves creating rivers of color against the gradually whitening backdrop.
“We’ve been waiting for this moment since the club was founded,” whispered Kieran McArdle, an Ottawa native who hasn’t missed a home match in three seasons. His voice caught slightly. “Football in the snow. For a trophy. In our city.”
What unfolded over the next 120 minutes would become instantly legendary in Canadian soccer lore—Atlético Ottawa claiming their first-ever North Star Cup with a dramatic 2-1 extra-time victory over Cavalry FC in conditions that transformed from picturesque to punishing as the match progressed.
By the second half, groundskeepers with shovels cleared the lines in fluorescent orange, creating surreal boundaries on a canvas that constantly tried to erase itself. Players’ movements left temporary trails, their sliding tackles etching momentary artwork across the pitch.
“We trained all week visualizing this match,” Ottawa captain Maxim Tissot told me as celebrations erupted around us in the locker room afterward, his championship medal hanging against a jersey stained with snow, sweat, and champagne. “But nobody prepared us for playing in five centimeters of snow. This became about heart more than tactics.”
The match initially seemed destined for Cavalry, the Calgary-based club that had dominated the regular season. They struck first in the 37th minute when Ali Musse curled a free kick that somehow found its way through a crowd of bodies and past Ottawa keeper Nathan Ingham. The visitors took that slim advantage into halftime.
What happened next exemplified the growing maturity of Canadian soccer. Rather than panicking, Ottawa adjusted. Their Spanish head coach Antonio Osuna—brought in after Atlético Madrid’s ownership group restructured the technical staff last spring—made a tactical switch that proved decisive.
“We noticed how the snow was changing everything,” Osuna explained. “The ball wasn’t running, so we abandoned our usual possession game. We went direct, we went vertical. The Canadians on our team understood these conditions better than anyone.”
Ottawa equalized in the 65th minute when Spanish midfielder Alberto Zapater—a winter transfer window signing from Real Zaragoza—delivered a weighted pass through the accumulating snow that local product Antoine Coupland converted with a first-time finish.
According to data from the Canadian Premier League, the match’s intensity never wavered despite the conditions. Both teams combined for 37 shots, with Ottawa placing 11 on target compared to Cavalry’s 8. The tracking data showed players covered nearly 11 kilometers each—remarkable given the resistance created by the snow.
Dr. Laura Benjamins, a sports scientist at the University of Ottawa who studies athletic performance in extreme weather, noted the exceptional demands placed on players. “In these temperatures, with wet snow making kits heavier, players expend 20-30% more energy than in optimal conditions,” she told me. “What these athletes achieved physically borders on the extraordinary.”
As regulation time expired with the teams deadlocked, the snow intensified. League officials conferred briefly about visibility concerns but determined conditions, while challenging, remained playable. The 24,000 spectators—a record for a domestic club final in Canada—stamped their feet not just in excitement but to maintain circulation in the -7°C temperature.
Ottawa’s winning moment came in the 112th minute through Malcolm Shaw, who had battled injuries throughout the season. Shaw, who joined from Halifax Wanderers in a controversial mid-season transfer, controlled a bouncing ball on his chest, pivoted away from his defender, and struck a half-volley that skimmed across the snow-covered surface and nestled in the bottom corner.
“I couldn’t even feel my toes,” Shaw admitted later. “But I felt the connection with my foot and just knew. In that moment, the cold disappeared.”
When the final whistle blew, Ottawa players collapsed into the snow as the stadium erupted. Five years after entering the league, the club had delivered on the potential promised when Spanish giants Atlético Madrid became the first European club to invest in Canadian soccer.
For the Canadian Premier League, now in its seventh season, this final represented significant progress. Viewership data provided by Canada Soccer showed a domestic television audience of 1.2 million viewers, with international broadcasts reaching 28 countries—figures that would have seemed unimaginable when the league launched.
“This is exactly the vision we had,” said CPL Commissioner David Clanachan. “A uniquely Canadian sporting spectacle, played at an increasingly high level, creating moments that become part of our sporting identity.”
As I watched supporters and players celebrate together long after the match ended—some making snow angels on the pitch that had become their theater of dreams—I thought about what McArdle had told me before kickoff.
“This isn’t just about football,” he’d said. “It’s about belonging to something that’s ours. Something that represents us as Canadians, playing our way, in our conditions.”
In the snowglobe that TD Place became on this November night, that belonging felt tangible, falling from the sky and covering everything in a blanket that, for a few hours at least, united a community in the shared warmth of sporting history.
