I know what you were thinking last night when Buck Pierce escaped the Eskimo hordes and began to skiddadle down the middle of the field.

"Slide, Buck, slide!"

"Go down, Buck, go down!"

Admit it. That's what your were thinking.

Same here.

Yes, I confess, I was thinking that Brittle Buck should have made like a World Cup soccer player and dove, dove, dove. I couldn't for the life of me imagine why Pierce would actually think he could get from Point A to Point B on a football field without suffering yet another calamity that would send him to the infirmary. Again.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers quarterback is, after all, as brittle as a piece of burnt toast. That isn't a play-call chart he wears on his left wrist. It's one of those medic-alert bracelets. He's seen more doctors than Gray's Anatomy. Pierce pulls a groin picking his nose.

Thus, when he somehow managed to Houdini his way out of the grasp of ill-intentioned Edmonton Eskimos defensive back David Pittman late in the first half of the Canadian Football League's marquee match this week, I feared the worst. I thought train wreck. I thought three-alarm blaze. I thought Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan on a date.

But, lo and behold, when Pierce crash landed 48 yards after the fact, he was in the end zone. Touchdown!

That was game. That was set. That was match.

Oh, sure, I realize the Eskimos recovered sufficiently enough to manufacture a two-point advantage by the time the goliaths retreated to their respective boudoirs for the halftime repose, but the damage had been inflicted. The Bombers, not so long ago a matter of considerable jocularity in CFL circles, were to triumph this night. For the fifth time in six assignments.

And Pierce's gallop is to be viewed as one of those germinal moments in play-for-pay athletics.

It was one thing that he actually arrived in the end zone with all his nuts and bolts in place, but his go-for-the-gusto giddyup sent a clear and galvanizing message to the defensive dozen in Blue and Gold garb in a 28-16 victory. To wit: You guys aren't in this alone. We can get the job done, too.

And so it was that the Bombers' seek-and-destroy defence, as fearsome and as punishing a brigade as has rode roughshod in the CFL for many years, took the cue from their QB and actually elevated their game.

The Winnipeg defenders, who have a Swaggerville, Mb., postal code, rag-dolled Edmonton pivot Ricky Ray and stuck to his receivers like scandal to Hollywood. These guys aren't just punishing. They're assassins. They're the Maroons Road Marauders. They don't just defend. They're the monsters of mayhem. And they seem to derive a considerable degree of glee in their ant-stomping antics. That's scary.

But for the most part this CFL summer, they'd been flying solo. That is to say, they'd been looting and pillaging while the offence had been hiding in the root cellar.

Not any more. Not after that Pierce gambol.

There is, of course, no guarantee that the 5-1 Bombers will carry forth and win the CFL championship because, to offer a sober second thought, I submit that Burnt Toast Buck will break down again (he will, as sure as Homer Simpson will have another donut).

Still, not since the likes of Greg Battle and James West and Tyrone Jones and Elfrid Peyton roamed the land have I seen anything like this defence. It is a fierce, formidable bunch with a thirst for hurt.

Are they brash and cocky? Annoyingly so. They are arm-wavingly, trash-talkingly arrogant. They have more swagger than Mick Jagger. And they're having fun.

Quite frankly, they're worth the price of admission, and I can't think of a higher compliment than that.