A rookie QB making his first CFL start led his team to its first win of the season in the last home game on the 2026 schedule.

Only Bryson Barnes’ wife and young son were among the 16,371 on hand Friday to witness his debut as a Canadian Football League starting quarterback — which turned into the most exciting and promising night at TD Place in years — but he knows why others close to him didn’t make the trip.

This weekend marked the start of deer hunting season in and around his tiny hometown of Milford, Utah.

Come on. They couldn’t miss that.

“I completely understand,” Barnes said from the post-game podium. “It’s a pretty penny to come out here.”

At the same time, the rest of his clan and his friends did catch the game on TV.

“There was like a little watch party with my family because a lot of people were in town,” he said. “I want to say opening morning is (Saturday) for the hunt, and so everybody was over tonight. They’re probably heading up the mountain right now.”

With a lot to talk about on the way.

Barnes also provided a rare stir of excitement and a nice parting gift for Ottawa Redblacks fans attending the final game on the team’s home schedule in 2026.

With his startling, gutsy performance in a dramatic, come-from-behind, 40-39 victory over the Toronto Argonauts, Barnes not only helped end a record 22-game losing franchise streak that dated back to last year, but he also gave them hope for the future.

It wasn’t just the way Barnes remained unflustered when overcoming a deficit created by an Argos touchdown on a blocked punt off Ottawa’s first possession.

It wasn’t just the way he completed 27 of 37 passes for 339 yards and two touchdowns without turning the ball over.

And it wasn’t just the way he carried the ball seven times for 62 yards, including a 21-yard dash up the middle one play before he fired a 24-yard bullet to Ayden Eberhardt in the end-zone for the game-winning touchdown with just nine seconds left in the fourth quarter — and two plays before rookie Paul Geelen booted the point-after to end the suffering.

It was the overall poise, control, and leadership Barnes showed the entire evening.

It was the way he looked like an unrattled, savvy pro when coming on to the field with 22 seconds left, his team trailing by six, and the ball on the Redblacks’ 43-yard line.

“I feel like the mindset that I took into this week, and also the messaging that I had for the guys (Thursday), was just taking it one play at a time,” Barnes said. “One play at a time in the sense that, regardless of if you lost the last rep, won the last rep, you go to the next one, and you try to make the most of that rep.

“So going into that last drive, that was just kind of the mindset. It was just play each play independently. Don’t try to do too much. Just execute the play, and it worked out for us.

“I wanted to make sure that I never lost the mentality of just one play at a time, regardless of what had happened before, just continuing to chip away,” he added. “And I wanted to put my head on my pillow at night knowing that I took good care of the ball and I was able to find completions and move the chains. We’ll watch the tape. Obviously, there’s going to be a lot to improve on. I’m excited to watch it, but I feel like I’m gonna be able to sleep pretty good tonight, knowing that I did those three things.”

Who is going to be the Redblacks’ starting quarterback next season?

Surely not Jake Maier again, nor McLeod Bethel-Thompson, the aging veteran who replaced Maier at the post a couple of weeks ago.

They aren’t going to sell belief or tickets.

Chad Kelly? The sometimes-spectacular Argos QB who annually leads the CFL in interceptions and limped off the field early in the first quarter Friday?

Maybe a reunion with Redblacks head coach Ryan Dinwiddie is a possibility, but, if the Argos let Kelly escape via free agency, they’d be in the same position Ottawa was in this season.

Barnes, who turned 25 on Oct. 7, might not come to camp as the No. 1 guy, but, based on what he did with his only opportunity to date, he certainly has to be leading the conversation today.

That had to be the question asked most often by anyone even vaguely familiar with the Redblacks’ plight, which was comparable, if not worse than “Silly Season ’88,” when the Ottawa Rough Riders stumbled and bumbled their way to a 2-16 record.

Dinwiddie liked the chances to get that first win better with Maier and Bethel-Thompson because they’ve been here and done that.

Asked the day before his debut when he felt “ready” for the starting assignment, Barnes figured “it was around week five or six, when things finally started to kind of click.”

Dinwiddie felt differently.

“Well, I would say, if we put him in there early in the year, you might not see this performance where he’s at right now,” Dinwiddie said late Friday night. “Young quarterbacks, especially in this league, you got to develop them. You know, 12-man football, guys moving around … He’s fresh out of college, right? So we had to make sure we gave him the time to develop.”

Any doubts Dinwiddie had in Barnes had disappeared with less than three minutes remaining, when the Argos took the ball over on their own 39, down by two points.

“We told the defence, ‘Hey, let them score,'” Dinwiddie said. “They would have ran down the clock and had a chip shot (field goal), right? So hey, let them score. We can go down and win it with a touchdown.”

So how, now, does Dinwiddie see Barnes projecting going forward?

“Well, I think right now let’s just be happy with his production that he had tonight, right?” said Dinwiddie, who confirmed Barnes would get the ball for next Saturday afternoon’s season finale in Hamilton, as if anyone had a doubt. “He’ll be our guy next week. Let’s develop him again, right? Put him in a favourable spot to execute and go from there.

“I think everybody wants to have an answer right away after you know one game. Let’s not jump the gun. But, you know, Bryson’s got a bright future with us.”

For his part, Barnes sounded like he might want to talk more about how Day 1 of the deer hunting season went rather than his game when he called home.

“You enjoy it for about 12 hours, and then you get right back to it and right back to work for the next week,” he said. “It’s the last week; it’s obviously got to be our Grey Cup, it’s got to be our Super Bowl. That’s got to be the mentality even though the season hasn’t gone the way we would have liked it to.

“I’m obviously grateful for another opportunity to just continue to showcase what I can do, but also to be able to go and play with these guys again. The team’s probably going to look a lot different next year, and you get one more shot to be able to go out there and do it. It’s the same process regardless of whether we won tonight or if we had lost. It’s going to be the same process going into next week.”

Said Eberhardt: “I think media, everybody, talks about the season that we’ve had, but we work really hard. Players, coaches, everybody. So just to be able to get that first one, I think it can definitely have a carryover effect and carry momentum into another year.

“I think, no matter what, just getting that first one, it truly means a lot. It’s a lot easier going into next year compared to going 0–and–18, and, if we get into the first game (next season) and we go down, maybe it kind of sneaks into everybody’s head, and it’s kind of always in the back of your mind a little bit.

“Just to have some belief, I think that mentally helps out a lot, not just for the next game, but next year as well.”