Good morning – and happy game day.

Yes, there are lots of more important news stories out there.

Alberta, like much of Western Canada, is being hit with the now annual spate of wildfires churning through the tinder-dry forests in the north, forcing tens of thousands of people from Manitoba to British Columbia to flee their homes.

Premier Danielle Smith met with her provincial counterparts in Saskatchewan this week, where she continued her campaign to get a new pipeline built to tidewater.

And Alberta’s grid operator said it is going to limit the amount of electricity it will provide to new data centres, putting a real dent in the provincial government’s hopes of becoming a hub for the energy-hungry infrastructure needed to run artificial-intelligence models.

But if there’s one story that has again put Alberta on the map this week, it’s those Edmonton Oilers.

After a wildly entertaining Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals on Wednesday – which saw the team pull off another come-from-behind win this playoff season, this time in overtime – a city that was already in a fever pitch somehow got louder.

It’s impossible to go far in Edmonton these days without coming across something Oilers related. Whether it’s a flag in the window of a home, a sign in a storefront or a dog wearing a jersey, the orange and blue is everywhere.

And despite the province’s outlier status in the eyes of some Canadians (because of some very loud Alberta separatists), there are signs that the Oilers could help bring the country together.

In Montreal, the Samuel-De Champlain Bridge was lit up in orange and blue. So was the CN Tower in Toronto. Even in the province’s rival city to the south, the colours could be seen shining from the Calgary Tower (although they say it’s for the 25th annual Calgary Brain Tumour Walk.)

“Any correlation to other uses of these colours around this time is, of course, purely coincidental,” the X account for the Calgary Tower posted.

Even in a remote Dene community 160 kilometres northwest of Yellowknife, the Oilers are the home team.

“We’ve been Oilers fans since the beginning, since birth,” said Gerry Nitsiza in a Globe story this week.

And there are Oilers fans from the United Kingdom and in the Prime Minister’s Office, where Mark Carney, raised in Edmonton, told The Globe’s Shannon Proudfoot this week that he would love to attend a game if his schedule would allow it.

Of course, all of the goodwill from fans across the country and around the world doesn’t mean Edmonton’s team is automatically Canada’s team.

The Globe’s Gary Mason addressed the issue in his column this week: “Is the Oilers bandwagon a vehicle for national unity? It depends on who gets aboard.”

This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.