On Saturday, the Queen’s Gaels will be playing in the game they’d been aiming for this season, the 117th Yates Cup, the Ontario University Athletics’ championship game, but they won’t be hosting it.

That might be for the best.

The Gaels (7-3) will face the undefeated Laurier Golden Hawks at University Stadium in Waterloo.

Queen’s is returning to the championship game for the first time since 2022 and has hoisted the trophy 23 times in the program’s storied history, the last time in 2009.

No. 24 would seem a seemingly daunting task Saturday — USports has ranked Laurier No. 1 since mid-September and if there’s ever a bullet that might be attached to No. 1, it would have been done after the Hawks’ emphatic 60-13 win in London against the Western Mustangs, at the time No. 2-ranked team

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