CALGARY — Darian Durant says the story of his near-departure from Regina when he thought he had no future with the Roughriders in 2006 was greatly exaggerated. Well, maybe not greatly.

“You weren’t on the plane and had to be dragged off?” someone asked Friday.

“No, no,” said the 27-year-old quarterback who will lead the Riders into Sunday’s Grey Cup game.

“At the airport?”

“Nope.”

“In the cab on the way to the airport?”

“Man,” said Durant, grinning, “how do these stories get started?”

“So it never happened?”

“Yeah, it happened,” he said. “It was maybe a couple of hours before I was leaving. I was packing up things in my apartment, heading home, and Mr. Tillman gave me a call and he said ‘Don’t you leave, I’m coming.’ He came over and sat down with me and reassured me about my place in Saskatchewan, said he wanted me here — and I thank him a lot for that.”

So it was the Riders’ absent GM, Eric Tillman, who talked Durant off the ledge when he was despairing of ever getting a shot. And it was head coach Ken Miller who finally sorted through the post-Kerry Joseph discard pile and decided Durant was the diamond in the rough among the suspects.

But after that, it was up to the poised, articulate Durant to justify their faith — and he has not let down the side.

In one improbable season of near-disasters and comebacks, of rough spots and recoveries, he has shown so much moxie at the most important position on the football field that it no longer seems prudent to dismiss out-of-hand the Roughriders’ chances on Sunday, even if the Anthony Calvillo-led Montreal Alouettes have dominated the CFL all season, and beat Saskatchewan twice head-to-head.

It’s a long shot, of course, but three years ago, so was Darian Durant. He kept getting knocked down, and kept getting back up. He seems unfazed by the spectacle, and undaunted by failure.

“This young quarterback of theirs gives them a chance. He’s the real deal,” said Alouettes head coach Marc Trestman, whose history of getting the best seasons out of a variety of NFL quarterbacks, never mind Calvillo, makes his a voice of authority.

Maybe the best thing about Durant, from the Riders’ perspective, is that he’s not going to develop to a certain point and then bolt for the NFL. He’s fast, but not fast enough. Has a strong, but not strong enough, arm. And he is, at a stretch, five-foot-11. But put him next to some of the CFL quarterbacks who have defined the position over the past 20 years, and he’s got all the earmarks.

Miller, at this week’s Grey Cup coaches’ press conference, said he believed when he took the job in 2008 that it was important — for the team, and for the league — that the Riders develop a young quarterback of their own, and not go out and sign a recycled veteran.

What he saw in Durant, after a year of experimentation with four different starting QBs, is very much what the oddsmakers don’t see when they install the Alouettes as heavy favourites — 9 1/2 points, by some accounts — to win the Cup.

“It may be a reflection of how they beat us head-to-head, maybe their regular-season record, I don’t know,” Durant said Friday. “We feel like we do whatever we do to win football games, and stats don’t matter. It’s the intangibles that we have, the little things we do well. You can’t measure the closeness of the team, how you deal with adversity . . .”

The great imponderable is what happens to Durant’s calm demeanour when bad things start happening on the big stage Sunday.

“I’m very confident,” he said. “We’ve been in pressure-packed games the last two weeks, first to get the West final at home, which we hadn’t done in 33 years, and then to get here — and we feel like we can handle it.

“I’m a competitor. If somebody stops me from achieving a goal, or if there’s a bump in the road, the next time I face that obstacle, I’m going to conquer it. If I make a mistake, shrug it off, just keep playing. It’s a long game, you’re going to get more opportunities.”

One more was all Durant asked, and all he was promised, back in 2006.

In retrospect, he’s glad he didn’t catch that plane. Almost as glad as the Roughriders.

Vancouver Sun

ccole@vancouversun.com