On Saturday night at the Centrium, the Red Deer Rebels will throw back to the 1990s.
Equipped with retro jerseys, plenty of Green Day and quotes from Jurassic Park, the night looks well on its way to being an entertaining one.
The players, however, most of whom were born between 1996 and 2000, had a bit of trouble with their ’90s knowledge.
Put to the test at practice Thursday, only two of four Rebels knew the last Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup was the Montreal Canadiens in 1992-1993.
That was 17-year-old Carson Sass and 20-year-old Austin Glover, both also the only Rebels questioned to successfully answer what year rookie Teemu Selanne scored 76 goals.
Even Winnipeg native Dawson Martin couldn’t come up with the answer to that one.
Martin did find a bit of redemption as he and Sass nailed down former Rebels from the ’90s, as Martin picked out Arron Asham and Sass reached deep into the Rolodex for Jesse Wallin. Sixteen-year-old Jacob Herauf also did well to get Rebels legend Jim Vandermeer.
None of the four players could recall the lyrics to the theme song for one of the most iconic television shows of the 90s, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but all claimed to have watched an episode.
Herauf, one of the youngest Rebels, and Glover, one of the oldest both were spot on recalling Backstreet Boys songs, with Herauf getting I Want It That Way and Glover struggling, but eventually going with Backstreet’s Back. One teammate was proud of his non-answer to this one.
All but Sass knew the biggest ’90s toy fad to be the Tamgotchi, a hand-held digital pet toy.
Ironically, Herauf, born in the year 2000, was the only Rebel to nail down a definition and complete understanding of ‘Y2K’, the impending world disaster where programmers represented the four-digit year with only two digits, causing mass spread panic.
Salt Lake City was a popular answer for the location of the 1996 Olympics, not the actual city, Atlanta. Ended up as the most difficult question on the day. Sass knew the Olympics two years later where in Nagano, Japan, scoring a few bonus points.
Perhaps the most disturbing lack of knowledge for current Rebels of popular 1990s culture was their confusion about Pogs. A popular schoolyard game in the ’90s, Pogs were a plastic disc that were largely a collectible.
The Pogs were placed face-down on the ground, and if they were flipped over when a bigger Pog was thrown on top of them, the thrower got to keep any Pogs that turned face up.
One of the most popular games of the 1990s, was lost in translation upon an explanation to all four of the players.
Well Pogs weren’t on their radar, each had a story of using a wooden stick, restoring some faith that even kids who weren’t alive for much of the ’90s, still had some connection to the ’90s era of hockey.
“In bantam we were at this tournament in Saskatoon and I broke both my sticks in the game. They had a small pro-shop. My dad quickly ran down and grabbed one,” Glover said.
Martin added: “My dad made me use the Sherwood PMP 5030 during practice because I’m skinny, to tire me out. He made me use those for like a year in practice.”
None of them offered to break out wooden sticks or JOFA helmets on Saturday night, but they’ll at least understand the Will Smith dances on the jumbotron.