After the second win in a row, my son started wearing his Canadiens jersey again. I haven’t started the coffee maker yet that I already know who was keeping the goals the day before, who scored for ours, and other statistics from the match that he feverishly recites to me, plugged into the family tablet at the table in the lunch. A true believer who listens The goal loop, which sings with Loco Locass the gesture of “our knights […] on the run to bring the Grail back to Montreal”.
I feel like those Catholics whose devotions are limited to attending midnight mass every year. With a calculated loyalty, fickle on principle, with a past as a former Bruins fan to make me forgive. At the beginning of last summer, while the fantastic ride carried away the sheep of our National Baptist, I was able to recite to you by heart the composition of the four trios of the Canadian.
Eight months later, without going so far as to recognize myself in this “dirty” that leaves “the deck of the ship” when things are going badly that the guys from Loco Locass denounced, I notice that Glorious in the cellar of the classification, it has the same effect as the obituary notice of an old flame that I haven’t seen for a quarter of a century. Small thought for the beautiful memories, but the heart is really very busy elsewhere.
Nevertheless, although I had foreseen the hangover of those who had not tasted champagne and the laborious start to the season that awaited them, it was not without bewilderment that I too attended the complete collapse of the team whose speed and natural skills had, only a few months earlier, reconciled me with the heritage of the Flying Frenchmen.
Granted, the club had lost in quick succession the mainstay of their defence, their best defensive striker, a promising young goalscorer and ‘Jesus Price’ himself. But how did we go from being legitimate Cup contenders to this bunch of cauldrons who no longer even pretended to be lucky to achieve their dream of when they were kids while earning something like a hundred times the average salary of their fellow citizens ?
They may have lacked a superstar to look like the 1983 Oilers or the 2008 Penguins, two teams that rebounded to dip their lips in the Holy Grail after ill-fated finals. But the setbacks of the summer could not explain everything.
My fall detachment — reading zero articles, news, analyses, reports or telephone tweets on Sainte-Flanelle and staying away from open lines, such was my new credo — may have helped me to understand what was going on. passed. Should we dismiss the coach, exchange so and so, go get so and so? No idea. But I could see that the Canadian was sorely lacking in two essential ingredients, the very ones that all the great religions of the world have the function of dissociating, but which sometimes merge in the heat of competition: pleasure, faith.
While sports journalists and specialized columnists were striving to replace Marc Bergevin, for my part, having raised my thinking to a whole new level, I looked at the overall portrait of the sports offer in Quebec. Since it seemed impossible, even counterproductive, to kick the ass of multi-millionaire players individually, the kick had to be aimed at the entire organization, notoriously laughing their heads off while, to encourage a team that had visibly abdicated in favor of a distant first draft pick, wave after wave of brainwashed fans kept turning the beer taps at the Bell Center.
And to metaphorically kick the buttocks of the senior management of the Canadian, there are not thirty-six solutions. It first takes a team in Quebec City to bring us back to the blessed days when the O’Keefe and a resolutely Francophone identity acted like so many stings preventing the big brewers on Atwater Street from sitting on their steak. Healthy rivalries may well develop between Montreal and the other Canadian NHL teams, but the Canadiens will never lose a single fan to the Jets or the Maple Leafs. While with the Nordics…
Another solution: if I had a small five hundred million to spend tomorrow morning, I would unearth five women or businessmen as visionary as me to found a professional women’s hockey league. We would start with six teams, some of which could be based in the United States. And the Hermines de Montréal concession player would be called Marie-Philip Poulin. After a few years, the same thing would happen as at the Olympics. NHLF hockey would quickly gain popularity and, in the hearts of Quebecers, the Hermines would heat the Canadian…
In the meantime, we have Suzuki, Caufield and Anderson on the first line, the little guys have just won a fourth in a row, Saint-Louis is on a crusade, and in the street in front of my house, there is a net of hockey and three young boys red with pleasure and cold, who believe in it. And that’s the goal.