Just one game or a warning sign for Edmonton Oilers?

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It took the Edmonton Oilers about 30 minutes to turn the clock back to last October and get everyone talking about the one thing this team doesn’t want to talk about.

Last year.

They spoke all training camp about focusing on the here and now and leaving last season in the rearview mirror, then they turned the key, hit the gas, and slammed head-on into recent history.

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And now, after a complete and utter face 6-0 plant against the Winnipeg Jets, there is no choice but to compare what happened Wednesday night at Rogers Place to last year’s curtain-opening debacle, an 8-1 loss in Vancouver

As much as they all want to forget it, they all remember.

And now they have to answer the fair and obvious questions: Is this going to be a repeat of last October for the notoriously slow-starting Oilers? Did they learn enough from last year’s crash to realize the danger of a slow start? Or maybe did they learn enough from last year to realize that there is plenty of time to recover from the first few weeks of the season?

“I’m sure you’ve heard some cliches about it being one game and all that, but that’s the reality of it,” said defenceman Mattias Ekholm. “It’s one out of 82 here, so we’re not going to get too down on ourselves. But obviously, we’ve got some homework to do. We know we can get to a much higher standard, a much higher level.”

One thing is for certain: You never worry about the Oilers. Whether they’re going to once again make things harder on themselves than they need to be remains to be seen, but few teams have the ability to fight their way out of an impending disaster like this one.

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We know they can rebound from a slump. We know Stuart Skinner can rebound from a bad game.

You have to assume they will be fine in a couple of days when Chicago and Calgary, a couple of bottom-tier teams, come to visit. Right now, you have to give the Oilers the benefit of the doubt. They’ve earned the right to say ‘It’s just one game,’ and even though it looked exactly like that 8-1 loss to Vancouver, it has nothing in common with last year’s home opener.

Skinner had a bad night, the errors on defence compounded an already shaky situation, and it snowballed. That’s probably the end of it.

In the meantime you can also, in the back of your mind, worry a little bit that the concerns people had about the Oilers heading into this season were at the heart of Wednesday’s massacre.

We wondered about a potential sag on defence with Cody Ceci, Vincent Desharnais, and Philip Broberg out of the picture and it happened. Ty Emberson and Travis Dermott weren’t great on a night when none of their teammates were, either.

We wondered how losing some key penalty killers in the off-season shuffle would impact one of Edmonton’s biggest strengths and they gave up two power play goals on the first three chances Wednesday.

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We wondered if the Stanley Cup letdown they all listed as the root cause of a weak, 3-5 pre-season in which they gave up a league-worst 36 goals, might bleed into the regular season and it was clear that the jump and intensity just wasn’t there.

We wondered which Stuart Skinner we’d see — the rock-solid guy who can win eight or nine in a row, or the one who has to re-set after a statistical plunge — and it was the latter in Game 1.

“I feel terrible about what happened,” Skinner said after the game. “It sucks, especially when you do it two years in a row. You just don’t want to believe that you are going to have a crappy start again.

“Then again, it is one game and we have some games coming up here where we can change that up and that is completely up to us and how we show up.”

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That’s the only way to look at it. One game. But, we can also say for certain that given the memories of last year’s start, there is no way this weekend should look anything close to what Wednesday did.

If it does, there’s a problem.

“We got punched pretty good tonight but we’ve always been able to respond,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch. “Last year I was happy with our guys — when we did have a bad game we usually responded really well.

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“We’ll see this weekend. This was one game. After this weekend, definitely, that will be a tell of where we are at.”

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