To their credit—and it’s about the only thing they can or should be saluted for in the wake of a season-ending 56-18 dismantling at the hands of the Montreal Alouettes—the B.C. Lions didn’t try to sugarcoat what happened to them in the Canadian Football League’s eastern final on November 22.

And how could they? It’s virtually impossible to put a positive spin on a loss like that one. And so the Lions didn’t bother trying to offer up explanations or excuses. The scoreboard said all that needed to be said about a game that was over before halftime.

“Montreal was the better team today,” Lions coach and general manager Wally Buono offered up as an understatement in the moments following the game at Olympic Stadium. “The Alouettes were better prepared. They were very physical, they were very skillful, and they deserved the victory.”

Outclassed in every facet of the game by the best team in the CFL this season, the Lions went down without much of a fight. And in the big picture, it’s probably better for Buono and the decision makers in the organization that the Lions were picked apart in their final game.

Had they hung tough with the Alouettes, the Lions could have—and likely would have—mistakenly tried to tell themselves and others that they were at or near the same level as the Alouettes. But by getting blown out the way they did, they weren’t fooling anyone. Plain and simple, this year’s version wasn’t good enough. The Lions started the year with one win in five tries, and that’s exactly how their season ended. And in between, they were never really anything better than mediocre. It was a year that included four losses by 27 or more points, including two blowouts in the final three games of the season. So changes will be made.

The main change, though, has already taken place, with Casey Printers returning to the fold and showing flashes of the quarterback who dominated the CFL five years ago. But despite all the hype around Printers’s resurrection, it must be noted that he won just one football game in his second go-round in the Lions den. So there is plenty of work for Printers to do—but certainly he can’t be expected to do it all himself. He gives every indication of being the guy this organization must move forward with both on and off the field, and he’ll have the off-season and a full training camp to ready himself for the 2010 season.

Although Printers, with his athleticism and scrambling skills, is the very definition of a playmaker, it became obvious as the season wore on that the Lions were lacking playmakers on the other side of the football. The organization has done a nice job of injecting young talent like Printers (still just 28), Martell Mallett, Emmanuel Arceneaux, and Sean Whyte into their offence and special teams, but it’s been a couple of seasons since the Lions have added any impact players to the defensive fold. And in almost every game this season, that was all too apparent. There are age issues at almost all of the defensive positions, and clearly that is an area the Lions need to address over the winter.

Overall, the loss in the eastern final was an ugly end to a sub-par season. In his years at the helm, Buono has raised expectations for this organization, and this year the B.C. Lions failed to measure up.

Hours after the Lions were obliterated in Montreal, the Vancouver Canucks fell 1-0 to the Chicago Blackhawks at GM Place. Although they weren’t scorched for 56 the way the Leos were, the Canucks weren’t good enough to get a win, either. And the performance raises an intriguing debate about this year’s Canucks. Can they afford to view a 1-0 loss to one of the top teams in the National Hockey League—a game in which they outshot the Hawks 30-17 and were an Alex Edler blast off the goalpost away from tying things—as positive? Or is that an indication that when healthy and carrying the play for much of the night, the Canucks still aren’t good enough to find a way to beat a team playing its third road game in four nights, and one that opted to start Antti Niemi, its backup goalie?

In recent weeks now, the Canucks have played well against both Chicago and the Detroit Red Wings—the two teams that advanced to last spring’s Western Conference final, and two teams the Canucks want to believe they can compete with. And in those two games combined, against two backup netminders (Niemi and the hardly legendary Jimmy Howard), the Canucks have managed to score exactly one goal—and it banked in off a skate on a power play.

There is a danger for the Canucks in thinking that their performance in those games is acceptable. Good teams find ways to win and don’t settle for moral victories. The Canucks are as healthy as they’ve been all season (certainly healthier now than most teams around the NHL); they’re in a stretch of the schedule loaded with home games; and now is the time to start making up ground in the Western Conference standings.

But for that to happen, they’re going to have to beat those teams above them—and right now there are too many of them. The Canucks missed a golden opportunity against the Blackhawks. They didn’t play poorly, but they didn’t get a win. And at the end of the night, that’s really all that matters.

Jeff Paterson is a talk-show host on Vancouver’s all-sports radio, Team 1040. E-mail him at jeff.paterson@team1040.ca.