As the Yukon worked its way to a ninth place team finish in table tennis at the Canada Winter Games Tuesday afternoon, Quebec and British Columbia found their way to the gold medal match set for tonight.

With the exception of the medal rounds, team play in the sport wrapped up yesterday with the relegation rounds and semifinals.

The round would see Yukon defeat Prince Edward Island 7-5 in many closely-scored hard-fought games. To the Yukon's advantage though, head coach Kevin Murphy admitted, P.E.I. arrived at the Games short one player which meant an automatic win in two of the best of five competitions for team play.

'It was a wonderful win over P.E.I. It was another tight one,' Murphy said.

Many of the games played, a best of five in singles and doubles for each player, points continued to follow one behind the other. Just as a P.E.I. player would gain a one point lead on a Yukoner, for example, the Yukon would quickly catch up and take the lead, and vise-versa.

In the final singles match between Yukoner Ryan Bachli and Team P.E.I's Darcy Cudmore, the game didn't end at the usual 11 points it takes. Rather the need for the two-point difference in the end led to P.E.I. having to fight it out for a 15-13 win.

That was the only game in that portion of the match where Bachli was defeated, with two wins of 11-7 and another of 11-9.

The win cost Murphy a rare pin from the 1996 Olympics which featured Marvin the Martian playing table tennis, which Bachli received after the win.

'He sealed the team win,' Murphy said, who especially enjoyed the competition against Team P.E.I. since he lost to P.E.I. coach Graham Forrester.

'So this, in a way, is revenge played out 25-plus years later and I don't mind that either,' he said.

In the end though the coach says the pin and the loss of his mustache, which he lost when the Yukon won it's round against Team Nunavut, are worth it.

'Our goal was to win in order to get ninth place,' Team Yukon's Malkolm Boothroyd said. 'Because it was a team that was closer to us our goals are a lot better against stronger teams.'

Up against teams like Ontario, which have more experienced players and more opportunities to compete, Yukoners focused on more individual goals like making a certain shot or gaining a number of points in a match.

Against their peers like Nunavut and P.E.I. though, the team focused on winning.

'My main goal was to do my part and win the matches I could,' Boothroyd said of the battle against P.E.I., adding it's harder to win points on an underspin serve rather than topspin.

'It ended up working in the end,' he said.

Boothroyd managed to achieve that, taking his singles round in four games with wins of 11-6, 11-9 and 11-8 against Cody Cudmore, who defeated Boothroyd 12-10 in the third game.

'I had to play a very defensive game,' he said, noting it's hard to win a point Boothroyd was joined by Ben Barrett-Forrest for the doubles round, which the pair took in three games against Cudmore and Ryan Forrester, with scores of 11-8, 14-12 and 11-3.

His games were early, forcing him to sit on the sidelines until all the matches were finished.

'I find it very tense waiting,' Boothroyd said.

As the Yukon wrapped up its team play, Quebec and Ontario finished its semifinal match 7-5 with many close games throughout the time.

The match sends Quebec to the gold medal final with Ontario facing off against Alberta for the bronze tonight.

Quebec came to the Games with the goal of getting to the gold medal round, said head coach Jean-Baptiste Bertrand following the match.

To bring home the gold though, he believes the team will need to have some bigger wins against British Columbia than they did against Ontario.

'We were stronger on paper (than Ontario), but we still had to execute,' he said. 'We didn'' win big matches and we will have to do that tomorrow to win against B.C. because they have a stronger team than Ontario.'

The two teams in the final round are no strangers to one another as they compete a couple of times a year, he said.

'We've been filming them, studying them, writing game plans against them. We know the opponent we're not going to change anything now,' he said.

The team has to be ready for an emotional match and keep focused on the games at-hand regardless of who is in the lead at the time, he said.

B.C. head coach Chandra Madhosingh said it's thanks to a grant from the provincial government that his team is heading into the gold medal round.

When the B.C. government asked him what it would take to get the provincial team to the podium at the Games, he came up with a plan that would see the team travel to China, Japan, Germany or Sweden to train for two weeks over Christmas.

After that plan was turned down as being two expensive, her proposed bringing two table tennis experts form China to B.C. to train the team over the course of a month.

At a total cost of $15,000, with the government paying half and the British Columbia table tennis association paying the other half, Madhosingh said he's happy to see what's coming out of that training.

'I think it's paying off,' he said.

Initially he wasn't sure the team would beat Alberta in the semifinals, but the team ended the match in an 8-4 win, he said.

As for going up against Team Quebec, he stated: 'All I can say is we're going to try our best.'

The gold and bronze matches will get underway at the Canada Games Centre at 6:30 p.m.

The final standings for other teams are in order from fifth to 11th: Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon, P.E.I. and Nunavut.

Heading into the individual rounds, which began this morning, Murphy said the format will be similar to the team matches with players ranked based on games. They will then move into the relegation and final rounds.

While players have seen many of the competitors they'll be facing already, Murphy noted there will also be some new opponents they didn't face in the team matches.

Boothroyd has set his sights on a match against a Newfoundland player, who's his closest ranked competitor in the Games.

Players are ranked by numbers, with the higher the number the higher the rank, with Boothroyd at a 240 rank and the Newfoundland opponent in the 500 rank.

'My goal, definitely if not to win that match, is to get a couple of games off him,' Boothroyd said.

Individual rounds will continue tomorrow and Friday.