Muirhead continues her Players' Championship dominance while Gushue finally gets his first

One skip positively owns The Players' Championship.

The other had been fruitlessly chasing it through his entire career.

For Scotland's Eve Muirhead, a win in Toronto has become almost an annual rite. For Brad Gushue, a Players' Championship victory had been as slippery as one at The Brier, the one great trophy that still eludes the 35-year-old from St John's.

Gushue finally ended the Players' Championship drought, taking a 5-4 win over the 2015 winner, Brad Jacobs and his crew from The Soo.

"We've put in the work, we're reaping some of the benefits right now," Gushue told Sportsnet's Joan McCusker immediately after the win.

The win pushes Gushue and his teammates - Geoff Walker, Brent Gallant and Mark Nichols - to 97 on the season with a chance to hit the century mark at the season-ending Champions Cup, beginning April 26th. Once again, they are the number one ranked team on the planet according to the World Curling Tour's Order of Merit Standings (year-to-date).

Muirhead and her Scottish champions put the broom woes that dogged them at the World Championship behind them on the way to yet another Toronto victory. With third Anna Sloan nursing a knee injury, Manitoba's Cathy Overton-Clapham jumped in as a substitute, helping Muirhead, Vicki Adams and Sarah Reid take a 9-6 win over Jennifer Jones in the final.

Muirhead must really love Toronto by now, winning her second Players' in a row and third in four seasons, all of them in the Ontario capital.

The 25-year-old skip had written a column just after the worlds, bemoaning the state of the game when it comes to the ongoing issue of broom heads. Feeling her rink was at an equipment disadvantage, she said they even switched to different heads mid-tournament. While the change did not pay off in Swift Current, she and her teammates had obviously gotten used to the new brushes in Toronto.

"I think even what’s happened this week is a step forward (compared) to what it was at the World Championship," Muirhead had told me just before the weekend playoffs began. "Because the World Championship, for me, was terrible.”

She was talking about the difference in rules pertaining to brushes. At the worlds, teams were allowed four new broom heads before every game and that more easily allowed them to rotate them to keep one or two heads fresh for late game situations, which in turn meant more "carving" of a stone's path. At The Players', just two new heads were allowed and brooms had to be designated for left side or right side sweeping, with no switching.

Not that there wasn't controversy at this event, too. When a couple of teams pushed the envelope on the rules a little, the Grand Slam's Competition Director, Pierre Charette, vowed he would start penalizing them if they didn't toe the line.

Like most players, Muirhead and Gushue just want and end to broom head roulette, with a return to placing the onus on the shooter.

“Back to how it was would be fantastic," Muirhead said. "Because that’s when it was more of a skill game."

Whatever solution is presented, Muirhead says she'll accept it with a shrug. Why not? She and her teammates are good at making adjustments so long as the game isn't constantly and quickly changing. “I haven’t actually thought a lot of it," she said when asked about a broom solution. "Because I think we’ve just gotta go with the flow. You’ve gotta go with what’s happening. We can’t influence, too much, the final decision but obviously we want it to be back to a sport of curling and not a sport of brushing.”

Gushue, of course, set this whole season of broom unrest in motion when he and his teammates showed what the new generation of heads can do when used effectively, back in September. It's been a bumpy season because of the sweeping tumult and Gushue is looking forward to it all ending.

“I do like that we’re starting to get closer to a solution,” he said, hopeful that next month's World Curling Federation broom summit will see strong regulations regarding equipment introduced.

“It’s been a pain in the butt," he said of the season-long controversy.