Before the largest curling crowd in the world this season, Canada's Brad Gushue made a few of the biggest shots of his career to win his first Ford World Men's Curling championship.
When the Newfoundland skip and his team won the St. John's Brier, the worry was that the Edmonton worlds would be anti-climatic. And when he went through the round robin like a runaway train, the concern was that he'd be overconfident like so many Canadian teams before him.
Like Rachel Homan before him in Beijing, becoming the first to win the women's worlds with a perfect 13-0 record, Gushue became the first men's team to turn the trick with a 4-2 win over Niklas Edin on Sunday to go 13-0 as well.
"It's awesome. Boy, oh boy, that was a stressful game," said Gushue. "This is right up there. This is the icing, the candle and everything on the cake.
What an event. What a week. What a year.
"They are one of the best teams in the world and it took everything we had to beat them," Gushue said of the team put together by Edin, who had won the last two Ford men's worlds in Canada.
A crowd of 7,292 going against the Edmonton Oilers' final game of the regular season at Rogers Place, beat the St. John's, N.L., final game crowd count of 6,471 to give Edmonton a total of 88,714 for the week, and Gushue paid them off.
"It's been a great week and a great year," said Gushue of the team that had outscored their opposition by 57 points (96-39) in their remarkable 12-0 run to get to the gold-medal game and had left 27 ends not played after shaking hands in the process.
But in this one, the Newfoundland team that had scored two or more with the hammer on a ridiculous 72 per cent of the ends, couldn't get away on Edin.
There were nothing but singles and blank ends all the way to through to the eighth end with the score tied 2-2.
Edin curled 98 per cent through the first five ends to 88 by Gushue to put himself in position to set up the scenario he wanted.
But it was Edin with who put the noose around his own neck with his first rock in the ninth that called a freeze and came down wide and heavy and left a double and the first deuce of the game for Gushue to go ahead 4-2.
Edin messed up his first shot on the 10th while Gushue made his shot to run the Swedish skip out of rocks.
A statement was made by Switzerland here, said skip Peter de Cruz.
"We belong with the best," he said of his team that included 25-year-old last rock thrower Benoit Schwarz, third Claudio Paetz and lead Valentin Tanner after a 7-5 win over John Shuster's Americans to win the bronze medal Saturday afternoon.
Hitting for four on the seventh end effectively ended the game.
Ten stones were in play when they got to skip rocks. Shuster was facing four and only clipped one, leaving Schwarz and easy takeout and stay to put up the four.
"We feel very awesome," said Schwarz. "I have to say it's a relief because it was a week with a lot of pressure. We had to qualify for the Olympic and we wanted to do well.
The team that dominated the championship ended up dominating the all-star team.
Unlike the Brier and Scotties, where the Curling Reporters of Canada vote to determine the all-star teams, the World Curling Federation uses the shooting percentages going into the final day of play to select the squad.
All four members of Brad Gushue's team were named all-stars.
Gushue's 92 per cent won at skip with Mark Nichol's 90 per cent topping all thirds, Brett Gallant's 92 per cent winning out at second and Geoff Walker's 92 per cent tops at lead.
Thirteen days earlier, Joanne Courtney and Rachel Homan arrived home in Edmonton after winning the gold medal at the Beijing women's worlds. Sunday in Saskatoon, they played each other in the final of the Canadian mixed doubles championship.
Edmonton's Courtney, teamed with Reid Carruthers of Winnipeg to defeat Homan and John Morris 9-6 in an extra end. The Courtney-Carruthers team now advances to Lethbridge to the mixed doubles Worlds April 22-29.