Canada bows out at the World Men’s Curling Championship. Kevin Koe confirms the end has come for his team

There will be better days ahead for Kevin Koe. Just not with the team he took to Beijing.

Moments after Canada's deflating, 7-5, World Championship bronze medal game loss to the Swiss on Sunday, the skip confirmed, during a post-game interview on TSN, that he would be moving on without mates Nolan Thiessen, Carter Rycroft and Pat Simmons.

“I think it’s fairly obvious, this is our last hurrah," Koe said.

Obvious, yes, because the rumours of his team's break up had been swirling through the winter breezes most of the curling season, tempered slightly with a Brier win, but then all but confirmed when two other skips outed Koe's plans for next season.

"We really wanted t go out with a win," continued Koe. "We’re great friends. I love playing with the guys, and, you know, I love ‘em all. To go out the way we did is disappointing but we’ve had a great run over the years."

Ultimately, Koe, Simmons, Rycroft and Thiessen will have one more chance to go out with a bang as they are scheduled to take part in the season-ending Players' Championship in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, beginning a week from Tuesday.

That is, unless the parties involved feel like giving us a sneak peek at how things are reported to look next season. In that event, Ben Hebert, Marc Kennedy and Brent Laing could all don the Team Koe purple at Summerside.

Not that Koe would go into detail and confirm the names of his new teammates. When asked directly by TSN's Vic Rauter to name them, he replied “I don’t think this is the time. We’ll go there after this event and worry about it then. We’ll address it a little later.”

A little later ought to be any time now. Might as well go on and get it out there, as the changes are already the worst kept secret in sports.

The Koe team's leaving Beijing without a medal marks the first time since 2001 that Canadian men have failed to grab at least a bronze medal at a world championship competition. That's when Randy Ferbey - newly announced inductee into the World Curling Hall of Fame - skipped a fourth-place finisher.

That Ferbey team, however, then went on to win three out of the next four World Championships, something the current Team Koe will not accomplish.

Koe will set sail on a new Olympic cycle, steaming ahead with what will be - on paper at least - a superstar team that will take a backseat to no one in Canada except, perhaps, the Olympic champion Brad Jacobs rink.

The skip's future is set, but the same is not to be said for the teammates he's leaving behind. Rycroft has stated that he'd like to step back from the game next year. Will he stick with that plan? Or, will he Simmons and Thiessen add a fourth and return to the Brier as Team Canada in 2015?

Whatever the future, you have to wonder what effect the team's impending break up meant at Beijing. While they performed mostly well in the time leading up to the playoffs, three straight losses on the weekend to finish off the podium might have some wondering if they really had the one for all and all for one mentality needed to take down top-notch teams from a world pool that continues to get deeper and more talented every year.

Russ Howard, commenting near the end of the bronze medal game telecast, dismissed the notion that the Koe foursome wasn't dialed in as a unit.

“They, probably, in a nutshell, just didn’t bring their 'A' game and at this level, now... you have to bring your 'A' game to win this event. There’s a lot of good teams out there,” he said.

“You get the feeling with Canada that they’ve had an awfully long season. They went really hard in the fall, with all those bonspiels. Played more than they normally would, trained more than they normally would.”

Maybe so, but it's been a long season for a lot of teams out there. And Koe's squad did take off pretty much the whole time between the Olympic Trials and the Alberta Playdowns, a two-month period that should have recharged their batteries. Might have done just that as, after a slow start to provincials, they caught fire and rode that all the way to a national championship.

Not buying the fatigue argument. Unless they were just plain old tired of dealing with speculation. That could well be. Certainly, though, you don't get the feeling that the foursome was dealing with any rancour on the ice. Communication seemed good or, at least, friendly and without hint of trouble.

Maybe it's just that it's a whole bunch tougher to take it all the way in global curling these days.

Or, maybe, this was a team that had no real reason to fight for every inch of ice they could get.

At least not anymore.