Guest Post: One Girl’s Life Long Love Letter To The Montreal Canadiens

I’m guesting on a blog and am so honoured to have been asked!  I hope this foray into blogging is more successful than my previous feeble attempts at my own abandoned blogs.

Here’s my story.  I’m a single mom. I have 2 kids, a son by the name of Maximilian who’s 9 (and A HALF thank you very much) and a daughter, Sofía, who’s 7 (Mom! Don’t forget the AND A HALF part!).

If you check the date and do the math – yes, that’s right, I made not one, but TWO Scorpios! After spending my whole life prior to motherhood avoiding Scorpios at all cost. Actually, Scorpios are pretty awesome. You know, if they’re my children.

These guys are my absolute favourite people in the whole world. They’re not perfect and they can drive me crazy, of course. But they’re awfully interesting and very interested which makes them a pleasure to be around. We talk about everything. They’re awesome to have a conversation with, because the perspective of a child is refreshing and consistently makes me ponder subjects from a point of view I wouldn’t have considered with my tired adult brain.

I got ahead of myself and should also tell you that my story began many eons ago in a hospital in Santiago, Chile. My family immigrated to Montreal, Canada when I was all of 3. I was mainly raised in Montreal but have also lived in Ottawa, Montreal again, Quito, Montreal again, Saskatoon (yep), and now reside in a suburb of Vancouver.

Now, I grew up in Montreal during the 70s (cough, you may stop doing math now), and I saw the glorious Montreal Canadiens win a Stanley Cup or two when I was living there. This was a time when my brothers and I had stacks and stacks of hockey cards and took them to school to trade them and flip them off walls til their edges were frayed and demolished and oh my GOD what a time that was. We had Habs lunchboxes, we had Habs thermoses, we had Habs toques, we had Habs jackets. Teachers allowed time during class to talk about the game on the weekends, and during the finals? Well, we always won.

It is a magical memory of my childhood, these unhelmeted, chain-smoking heroes of mine never letting me down. The Cup was a given. We moved away from Montreal and there were years we didn’t win the Cup. Previously unfathomable, always crushing. The years passed and we got more used to it. Our unconditional love for our team never faltered however, no matter our geographic location. I’ve never understood how people expect me to cheer for the Canucks simply by virtue of living in Vancouver. I’m not anti-Canucks, mind you, but the Habs grabbed hold of my heart a long time ago and that’s all she wrote.

So, yes, the years passed….7 to be exact. It’s 1986. I’m living in Saskatoon. The city has Calgary Flames fever. With the other prairie teams being taken out by the Flames (Winnipeg, and then defending champs Edmonton), the team-less Saskatoon was now all-in for the Flames. Calgary marches to the final with Montreal! I watched all around me as friends and classmates were frenzied with excitement over the notion that the spectacularly mustachioed Lanny McDonald would be hoisting the Cup on that glorious day when they beat the Habs. I sat back in my experience and wisdom and let them enjoy their folly. My team had been here before. I knew what was going to happen. My team had never been to the final and lost. In my lifetime. This brilliant team captained by one of my heroes, Bobby Gainey, had a pencil-necked kid rookie in goal by the name of Patrick Roy. The team also had Nilan. Robinson. Chelios. Carbonneau. You see where my smug certainty came from. And a handful of other youngsters too like Claude Lemieux, Stephane Richer, Mike Lalor, and Saskatoon native Brian Skrudland. The young Mr. Skrudland scored the fastest playoff overtime goal in history in that series (that really smarted with the Saskatonians). I remember thinking, people are still bringing their hot dogs back to their seats, and the game’s already over! You know where this is going.

We won the Cup that year, and that indescribable, imitated but never duplicated feeling of your team winning the Stanley Cup was mine again. It was an amazing series. Dick Irvin teased Captain Gainey – when Gainey remarked about how it had been ‘so long’ since we’d won the Cup – pointing out the teams (cough, Leafs) who had gone decades without one, or never won at all. But we all knew what Gainey meant. It had been FAR TOO LONG for us, and he knew that our expectation was the Cup, always the Cup. It was his expectation, too. The 1986 cup was so much sweeter for the previous drought. The dynasty was upon us again, we could feel it! Yeah, yeah, the Flames beat the Habs 3 years later. So not so much with the dynasty. 

But THEN we beat the LA Kings in 1993, in all of 5 games, 3 of which were won in OT. That series I watched from very far away, living in Santiago again. That Cup was pretty much won for us by a now more experienced, bearded Patrick Roy. Our hero again. NOW we’d surely have a dynasty, right? Our Habs know how we expect the Cup to reside in Montreal, right? The cruel trick they played on us with 7-year droughts was played out now, right?

Wrong. Jump to 2010. Since 1993, I’d moved back to Canada, got married, had my children, got separated, all that stuff. You all know we squeaked our way in to the playoffs. And as prize for ‘winning’ the 8th place spot, we got to meet the Caps and Mr. Ovechkin in the first round. People laughed. Scoffed. Called the Caps in 4. But I believed. We made it past the team who was in 1st place during the regular season. Obviously, the regular season is meaningless. What’s more, we beat them in 3 games straight – 3 games in which we could have been eliminated. What heart this team had, how proud of them I was, making sure my kids were watching all the games with me, showing them these sterling examples of never giving up, and not listening to your detractors, believing in yourself.

Next series? The Pens. Defending Stanley Cup Champs. Captained by Team Canada’s golden boy, the young Mr. Crosby, who had scored the goal in overtime to give Canada, the birthplace of hockey, the Gold Medal in the 2010 Olympics over nemesis Team U.S.A. (just P.S. I give credit to that goal to the amazing pass by Iggy, how come no one ever talks about that?). Well, we beat the Pens, too. Took them to 7 exhilarating games. My children, now reciting stats in their sleep, had heroes. Scratched from that list was Sidney Crosby, whose petulant antics they hadn’t witnessed before and were so deflated by. “Mom, Sidney’s acting like a baby. He’s a GROWN UP. You’d never let us act like that”. Thanks, Sid. They were most unimpressed by his comments to the media after his elimination –  he still wouldn’t tip his hat to our boys. “Geez Mom. What a poor loser”.

One of the things that make me happiest about this post-season is the experience my children were having, the experience I had enjoyed as a kid, loving hockey, loving the Habs, experiencing the thrill of your team winning, and eliminating the so-called sure things on the path to what could ONLY culminate in hoisting, finally, FINALLY the only acceptable prize, the Stanley Cup. We know what happened, and it’s still too recent and painful to go into in great detail. We were eliminated yesterday by what should have been an ‘easy’ team to beat. We were inexplicably outplayed and beat, or at least, that’s how it feels. The enormity of it hasn’t quite registered itself with me yet.

But you know what? Here’s the good take-away. We still believe. And the kids’ eyes were shining this morning with the hope and belief that this team CAN. It’s heartbreaking to come crashing back to the ground after that high, but these newly-made die-hard fans already look forward to October, as do I.  These children now do what I do: say ‘we’ when referring to the Habs.  And that warms my heart more than anything, that in Vancouver Canucks land, this team cemented itself into the vulnerable little hearts that first beat in my womb.

Thank you so much, 2009-2010 Montreal Canadiens. I actually can’t thank you enough. I’ve loved you forever, and these precious people will too. I’ve complete confidence that they will see you bring the Cup back many times in their lifetimes. And thanks for once again not only making us believe, but expect greatness. We are terribly proud of you and thank you for an exciting post-season.

And one more thing: Go Chicago Blackhawks!

Veronica is a Twitter friend and member of a community of Canadiens fans that I am proud to be a part of. Find her and follow her @chile_pepper she’s good people.

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Joshua Murray

creator of content, daddy blogger, writer, coffee drinker, fan of the Batman. proud mo bro. prouder dad.