There is an idea that keeps returning around IK. That after the SHL years we need to come back down a little. Become realistic. Understand who we are. Understand our conditions. Above all, perhaps: understand our place.
Most of that is sensible.
The last part is complete nonsense.
IK Oskarshamn should understand its conditions better than almost anyone. We should know exactly what the finances look like, what our market can support, what Oskarshamn can offer and what bigger cities can do that we cannot. We should learn from the mistakes, not pretend that five years in the SHL made us something we are not.
But we should never understand our place.
Because if there is one thing this club's history should have made completely clear by now, it is that Oskarshamn's place is not determined by what seems likely.
It did not start in 2019. Or in 1992.
It is easy to begin the story of modern IK in the early 1990s. That was when a journey gathered speed which, after plenty of detours, would eventually end in the SHL.
But hockey in Oskarshamn obviously did not begin there.
When the hockey sections of Oskarshamns AIK and IFK Oskarshamn merged in 1970, the hockey culture, the rivalry and the crowd were already here. In fact, hockey interest in the town had one of its true golden periods as early as the 1960s. The town's attendance record still belongs to the era before the merger.
IK did not create Oskarshamn's interest in hockey. IK became its shared team.
And the ambition did not disappear with the merger. As early as the 1970s, players including Per Bäckman came to Oskarshamn. He would later reach much bigger stages in Swedish hockey, but Oskarshamn was there early in the journey.
Then came another real hockey wave in the 1990s.
At the start of the decade, IK played far down the Swedish league system. Even so, players such as Peter Ekroth and Skeeter Moore ended up in Oskarshamn. Seen through today's eyes, it almost sounds even more unlikely than it did then.
And they were not alone.
Kamil Kastak, Jarmo Mäkitalo and many more followed over the years. Kastak almost illustrates the whole point on his own: a Czech national-team forward with Olympic and World Championship experience who scored five goals in six games for IK in Division 2 in 1994/95.
IK has repeatedly managed to bring people to Oskarshamn who, on paper, should have had other options.
At the same time, the homegrown players have been there every time IK has taken another step upward. Some helped make the journey itself. Others became so good that their names eventually ended up hanging from the rafters of SHL arenas far from Oskarshamn.
That too is part of the unlikely story. A small hockey town that has repeatedly produced players for much bigger stages – while some of them chose to become part of IK's own journey.
Every step upward has looked different. But the homegrown players have been there.
That mixture is what matters.
We are perfectly welcome to buy stars. IK has done that before.
But then it should be genuine cutting edge. Someone who changes the team. Someone who feels a little too good, a little too expensive or a little too unlikely to end up in Oskarshamn.
What we do not need to buy is mediocrity.
If the quality already exists in Oskarshamn, there should be a path for it. If it does not, IK must be clever enough to find it somewhere else.
Homegrown players and unlikely top-end quality from outside.
That is much more IK than trying to build like everyone else.
The journey matters more than the years at the top
After the climb from the lower divisions of the 1990s came 23 straight seasons at Sweden's second-highest level before IK finally went up in 2019.
Twenty-three.
That number is worth stopping at.
Because the story is not that some rich owner suddenly decided to buy Oskarshamn a place in the SHL. Nor was it a straight-line success story.
There were qualifiers, failures, new attempts, financial realities, players who left, new ones who arrived, homegrown players, coaches, volunteers, sponsors and people who kept going even though, many times, it would have been much easier to settle.
And then came the team that finally did it.
Even the hockey was unlikely.
The IK that went all the way did not play like a team apologising for its circumstances. It played its own version of hockey. Puck, movement, courage. At times it could almost be described as tiki-taka on ice.
AIK fell.
Then Timrå.
On 8 April 2019, it was done.
Unlikely IK Oskarshamn was an SHL team.
The SHL proved something – but it is not the model
Five SHL seasons changed the club.
IK did not merely survive. In 2021/22 the team knocked out Leksand and pushed regular-season winner Rögle to a seventh quarter-final. The following season IK finished seventh in the SHL regular season.
Then it went the other way, and in 2024 the club was back in HockeyAllsvenskan.
We should learn from that entire period.
But if the question is how the next truly strong IK should be built, we think it would be a mistake to try to recreate the SHL years.
The secret lies further back.
In the journey there.
IK's old recipe cannot simply be copied. Hockey has changed. The money has changed. The player market has changed. Oskarshamn has changed.
But the principles are recognisable.
Relentless work.
Homegrown players who are good enough.
Players from outside who really feel a little too good to end up here.
People who want to be in Oskarshamn.
The courage to do something our own way when it would have been easier to copy someone else.
And a fairly deep-rooted refusal to accept what other people consider reasonable.
The situation has changed
There is, at the same time, a difference compared with both the early 1990s and the SHL.
IK is no longer the financial little brother every time the team steps onto the ice.
Not in HockeyAllsvenskan.
When Vimmerby, Kalmar or Karlskoga are on the other side, IK should not invent some David-versus-Goliath story. That would be just as detached from reality as believing that five SHL years turned Oskarshamn into a big city.
We have different resources now. Different expectations. A different position.
That changes the conditions.
It does not have to change the mentality.
Us against the rest has never had to mean that we are the poorest, the smallest or the underdog in every game.
It means we do not need the outside world's permission.
It means that when someone comes to BeGe, the basic attitude should be completely obvious:
We can beat you.
Not maybe.
Not if every bounce goes our way.
We can beat you.
Whoever is on the other side.
Then the work still has to be done. Confidence without work is just self-deception.
But the opposite is just as dangerous. Working hard while accepting a ceiling in advance is no Oskarshamn virtue. It is simply lying down in a slightly better-organised way.
We are not going back
That may be where the discussion about IK's future sometimes goes wrong.
We are not going back to 1993.
We are not going back to 2019.
We are not trying to build a copy of any of the SHL teams.
We are moving forward.
The next successful IK must be built for today's hockey and today's economy. The organisation has to become better, smarter and more professional. Revenue has to rise. Talent development has to work. Recruitment has to be better than our competitors' because we will not always be able to pay more than our competitors.
That is what understanding your conditions means.
But direction matters.
Establishing ourselves in the top half of HockeyAllsvenskan can be an intermediate target. It can be a necessary step. It may even take several years to build what is required for the next one.
But it cannot be the final destination.
The long-term direction for IK Oskarshamn should be the SHL.
Not because IK has a right to the SHL.
We do not.
Not because we are somehow bigger than everyone else.
We are not.
But because a club that decides it has found its natural place has also decided where its ceiling is.
IK never needs to do that.
The unlikely town
Perhaps it fits rather well here after all.
Oskarshamn has long been a town where the proportions do not quite add up.
A relatively small town with heavy industry and operations on a scale you might have expected somewhere else. Companies and people that established themselves and stayed. A local interest in hockey greater than the population figures should reasonably promise.
Not a place that, through history, could count on power – political, media or otherwise – automatically clearing the path.
People had to build anyway.
There is something in that which IK should never polish away in the pursuit of becoming a modern and professional hockey club.
Professionalism does not have to mean caution.
Realism does not have to mean submission.
Confidence does not have to mean delusions of grandeur.
You can know exactly how small the market is and still try to do something far too big for it.
It has happened before.
Let the others worry about what is likely
The next IK will not look like the team with Ekroth and Moore.
It will not look like the team that played its way up in 2019.
And it definitely should not pretend that relegation never happened.
The next IK has to be better adapted to reality than that.
But somewhere inside the new, the old still has to be recognisable.
The work.
The homegrown players.
The unlikely names from outside.
The willingness to stay.
The courage to play and build in a way that suits Oskarshamn.
BeGe as a place where nobody walks in and gets anything for free.
And above all, that almost irritating conviction that it really can be done.
We do not need to prove to Hockey Sweden that IK is a giant club.
We do not need to prove to anyone that Oskarshamn is something the town is not.
We only need to decide what we intend to try to become.
Understand where we come from.
Understand where we stand.
Decide where we are going.
Let the others worry about what is likely.