Edmonton Oilers playoff ace Evander Kane gave a huge shout-out to Edmonton and Canadian hockey fans today, appearing on ESPN’s popular Pat McAfee show.

“Pat, I would encourage you to come up to Edmonton and see for yourself,” Kane said, adding that McAfee could jump ship from being a Penguins fan and now cheer for the Oilers.

“We will have to make that happen,” McAfee said, but noted international trips aren’t easy as he recently had to sit on a plane on the tarmac for 3.5 hours coming back from Montreal to Indianapolis so a customs agent could be located. “But I’m in. We’ll come up to Edmonton.”

“You won’t be disappointed,” Kane said. “Whatever atmosphere you think you’ve been in that’s incredible and crazy and special, it’s going to get trumped all day long if you come up here to Edmonton and watch a home playoff game.”

Kane said he’d been to a Pittsburgh Stanley Cup finals game in 2009, the year he got draft. “It was great but it doesn’t even compare to Canada.”

My take

1. Well done, Evander Kane. Solid work as an ambassador for Edmonton, the city of the edge of the world. It’s not often an Oilers player gets on a big show like the McAfee show but Kane made the most of the opportunity.

2. After Kane’s segment, McAfee got out a map and had some fun with his crew, noting just how distant Edmonton was. Almost as far off as Greenland or Alaska, they said.

Of course, we can take a joke in Edmonton. And we are indeed a distant location even compared to other Canadian cities. But the isolation builds and binds up, pulls us together.

Even Kane, who grew up in Vancouver, has caught the Edmonton spirit, that urge to speak up for this city that is such a great place to live and raise a family, not to mention the most fanatical hockey city in the world.

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