Courtesy Vancouver Sun:

There was a day when you couldn’t have pressured Dave Dickenson the way the Saskatchewan Roughriders did Sunday, and made him wilt under the heat. He’d have carved you up like a turkey.

There was a day when, if you managed to get him in trouble, he’d have stepped this way or that, just enough to make you miss, and kept looking downfield for the play that had to be open.

That day may or may not be gone for good, but it was gone on Sunday at BC Place Stadium, where 54,712 fans — a vast majority of them screaming and banging their thundersticks for the Lions — kept waiting for the not-so-old but prematurely aged quarterback to snap his team out of its maddening ennui. To lead the comeback. To be the answer, not just another part of the question.

But the quarterback they waited for in vain was a memory.

“It wasn’t like I wasn’t throwing the ball accurately, but my game decisions weren’t as good as they needed to be. You can say it’s from lack of playing, but I’ve been around,” the always forthright 34-year-old QB said, in a dead-quiet Lions locker room after their 26-17 defeat — a result that sends the plucky Riders on to Toronto for a meeting with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in next Sunday’s Grey Cup game.

“When they gave me a look that wasn’t ideal to the coverage, I … maybe just didn’t see enough football this year to be smart, to throw the ball away and keep us in manageable second or third downs.

“Overall, I felt like the guys were looking for something, a spark, and I felt I could give it to them, and it just didn’t happen.”

At his best, whatever year that was — and there have been plenty of them — Dickenson could never do it alone, so there’s no singling him out from the pack of lethargic Lions for special blame Sunday, when the offensive line put up all the resistance of a set of swinging doors, and everyone took turns missing blocks.

Yes, there is a special place waiting in off-season Hell for the offensive front, which hit the lottery with that arbitrator’s cockeyed ruling on the Jason Jimenez case — allowing the suspended right tackle to play until whenever his appeal is heard — and then turned the lucky break into a disaster by failing to show up when the bell rang. Jimenez was extremely ordinary, but so were all of his mates; their plight made worse by an early injury to right guard Sherko Haji-Rasouli.

Look, there are about 42 reasons the Lions lost the West Final, wasting a club-record 14-win season, going down with such a tepid effort against an injury-riddled Roughriders side that didn’t just win, but dominated the home team.

Dickenson is only one of those reasons, but the quarterback always has more to say about the result than any other player on his team, so with the game still very much on the line when he came on to replace Jarious Jackson just before the half, he knew all eyes were on him, maybe especially the eyes of his teammates.

“I told the players after the regular season, the team that wants to win the Grey Cup the most is going to win. It’s not necessarily the team with the best record,” said head coach Wally Buono. “The playoffs are about wanting to do something that nobody else is willing to pay the price to do. And Saskatchewan came in here banged-up today, and they played better and harder than we did, and they deserved to win.”

Jackson had one of those games that, frankly, we suspected was just waiting to happen. His first playoff start, on a team that had been so good around him … it was impossible to know how he would react. When he got so little help Sunday, we found out: three completions in 12 attempts, two interceptions.

So it was a lot to ask that Dickenson would come in and cure all their problems — the poor blocking, the turnovers, and the failure of the defence to hold when it had Kerry Joseph and the Rider offence backed up in bad down-and-distance situations.

“If it was just one thing, we’d have fixed that one thing. But it was a conglomeration of things. Whatever could go wrong, went wrong today. Some mental, some physical, some schemes. Sometimes they brought something we couldn’t defend, other times we just screwed up, other times they just physically beat us,” said centre Angus Reid.

“Dave did some good things,” said Buono. “The thing is he probably tried to do too much, didn’t throw the ball away, and took some sacks. Those are things that killed us. The sacks, the penalties, the procedure calls really hurt us.”

“Every time I would have a good look to throw the ball, something would go wrong,” Dickenson said. “And you know, when they dropped into their zones, we just weren’t able to make it work up front. I doubt that they ever brought more than five or six [pass rushers], and we’ve always got six blockers, at least. That’s the discouraging thing.”

Buono, and all of his players, were unanimous in acknowledging that Kent Austin’s Roughriders — maybe especially Richie Hall’s defence — simply manhandled them Sunday, and for that, perhaps they have the bye week to blame, but it’s never an easy call.

“We had the layoff last year and came out and blew the doors off them,” said Reid, “so I don’t think you can lay it on the bye week. It’s a football game. That’s why fans show up. You have to play the game to find out who wins.”

Dickenson didn’t talk like a man coming to grips with the beginning of the end.

“My game management just wasn’t where it was when I was playing all the time,” he mused. “But honestly, they were the better team, and I don’t see why anyone in here would doubt that we just got outplayed today.”

But this much is for sure: with so little game action this season to call upon from his own memory banks, when the heat came, Dickenson looked muddled, dithering over his choices, and couldn’t pull the trigger on time, on target, often enough.

Maybe that’s not a terminal condition — maybe it’s nothing a full season of game-speed decision-making wouldn’t cure — but you had to wonder, watching him flinch under siege, if there’ll ever be another one of those.