Does Winnipeg have an airport?

St. Louis Blues fans who are desperately searching for rays of hope and joy to cling to during this playoff season that’s been barren of hope are increasingly turning to Paul Stastny.

Stastny, who in three playoff seasons with the Blues recorded a total of six goals and 17 points, has six goals and 14 points for the Jets in postseason games this spring. The Chaminade alum joins Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics as the second local product to guide their professional team to a conference final in the last week.

What makes Stastny’s performance even more impressive is that, as St. Louis Game Time is exclusively able to report, his travel schedule has been made more intense because Winnipeg, MB does not, in fact, have an airport.

This theory has been whispered among insiders for many years, but it picked up steam last night on Twitter. I decided to infer that I was in on the secret with the following tweet:

Winnipeggers seemed annoyed that their secret had been discovered, but they were clearly not in a position to deny the underlying assertion.

Even after I attempted to insert a degree of levity and play off the results of my investigation as though they were lighthearted, the Peggers weren’t having it.

“Lazy,” says Dawn G. The irony of Dawn’s assertion is that what she claims to be lazy is actually the result of tireless reporting that included visiting more than one Wikipedia page while working diligently at breakfast to avoid dropping bacon or coffee onto my keyboard.

I will concede that there is an airport in Starbuck, though it’s well camouflaged. Typing “Starbuck airport” into a search engine will yield results stretching from a mediocre coffee shop in most of the world to, perhaps, the best coffee shop in Tampa.

Google Maps informs me that Starbuck, MB is a mere 42.3 KM from Winnipeg. Still, for Jets players who must trudge down Manitoba Route 2 with their equipment bags strapped to their backs, that distance seems a yawning chasm at this time of year.

Another important clue came from “Business Trip,” a classic episode of The Office. In the episode, Michael Scott, Andy Bernard, and Oscar Martinez are dispatched to close a deal with a Canadian firm that, apparently, was unable to locate paper goods in a country whose economy is almost entirely tree-based.

Michael, enthralled by the romance of air travel, requests an in-flight meal from a flight attendant only to be informed that meals aren’t served on flights less than two hours in duration.

However, as Game Time can exclusively reveal, trips to Winnipeg through the air are no less than five hours in duration.

The Office is well known for being meticulously researched. The snacks and sodas sprinkled around the Dunder-Mifflin office are all accurate to the region, and real locations in Scranton are consistently utilized as settings in the show. Why, then, would the writing staff suddenly make such a gaffe when a major plot point hinges on their research?

They wouldn’t, but they were forced into writing fiction by a lack of available reality. There are no flights from Scranton to Winnipeg because there are no flights from anywhere to Winnipeg.

Manitoban readers of this article may be offended or scandalized that their truth is revealed to the world, but they should instead feel pride. The Jets have succeeded despite the struggles of their travel and the debasing that comes from begging visiting teams to hide their shame from the world more broadly.

Blues fans, who will undoubtedly be flocking northward for a white out, are soon to discover the shocking truth themselves. This investigation serves as a warning that’s designed to serve our readership and guarantee that those new to the landscape are prepared for the bleakness and desperation which awaits them.

Winnipeg does not have an airport.