Montreal Canadiens fans celebrate on Rue St Catherine after the Montreal Canadiens defeated the Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup playoff semifinals in Montreal.Peter Mccabe/The Canadian Press
They are Canada’s most storied franchise, chasing the world’s most recognized sports trophy, playing Canada’s national game.
And because this country is always a bit of a mystery to itself, many people, including more than a few sportscasters, don’t know how to pronounce their name.
They’re the Montreal Canadiens. Pronounced “Canadians,” at least in English. Not Canaydee-enz. Canadians.
It’s not clear what language “Canaydee-enz” is supposed to be an impersonation of, but it’s not French. In French, they are les Canadiens. Or, more often, simply le Canadien. A team in the singular, because the CH symbol stands for le Club de hockey Canadien. The Canadian hockey club. Pronounced in French as Cah-nah-diyen.
They’ve been around since 1909, winning 24 Stanley Cups, all the while as part of the national psyche. The game has changed over the years, as has the country, and Quebec and Montreal’s place in both. To follow the Canadiens is to see glimpses of all of that.
The gods of the old Canadiens Forum, Rocket included, have found the youngsters at the Bell Centre
The team is obsessively obsessed over in Quebec, yet its history, like that of its city, doesn’t fit with the Bill 96 vision of the province. All those storied squads of decades past were symphonies played where the two solitudes met. For 70 years, that was the fabled Forum – at the intersection of one street with an English name and another named after a French saint.
The team’s roster of champions is, like the country, a history that can only be told in both languages: Aurèle Joliat and Howie Morenz. Maurice Richard and Toe Blake. Guy Lafleur and Ken Dryden.
And as it was at the old Forum, so it is at the Bell Centre. The organist plays Les Canadiens sont là! and Hava Nagila. The words on the players’ dressing room walls are from In Flanders Fields. Announcements are in both official languages. And when fans were finally allowed to return on May 29, they welcomed themselves back with an a cappella O Canada – the bilingual version the Canadiens have always used.
In a city where bagels are older patrimony than poutine, the home team is an amalgam of languages and backgrounds, from coast to coast and far beyond.
This year, for the first and probably last time, the National Hockey League was compelled by pandemic circumstances to create a Canadian division. The Canadiens and their old rivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs – whose colours the humiliated protagonist of Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater was once forced to wear – faced off in the playoffs for the first time since 1979.
In that earlier era, NHL rosters were all-Canadian shows. The Leafs and Canadiens of 42 years ago each had just one non-Canadian player. It was – literally, figuratively, statistically – our game.
As the world embraced our game, that changed. Fewer than half of today’s NHLers are Canadian. The Habs are heading to the finals for the first time in 28 years thanks to an overtime goal from one of their three Finnish skaters. Their electrifying rookie is a pint-sized sniper from Wisconsin.
But the team is still largely Canadian. That includes a towering captain from Sicamous, B.C.; a line of aging grinders featuring a former NHL scoring champion from Peterborough, Ont., and the son of sod farmers from Thunder Bay; and the team’s top playoff scorer, from Scarborough, Ont.
And in this improbable run – the Habs barely eked into the last spot in the round of 16 – their two best players have been forward Nick Suzuki and goalie Carey Price.
Mr. Suzuki, the team’s second-highest point-getter in the playoffs, and whose vision keeps setting up goals, is a fifth-generation Japanese-Canadian.
Mr. Price, a force of preternatural calm, grew up in tiny Anahim Lake, B.C. His dad regularly had to fly him in a little four-seat plane to games in Williams Lake, more than 300 kilometres away.
At the end of the last game against the Vegas Golden Knights, which sent the Canadiens to the finals, Mr. Price waved to his family up in the stands. And then in a TV interview, modest and grounded as ever, the best goalie in the world turned attention away from himself and talked about how proud he was of his mom, who had just been re-elected chief of the Ulkatcho First Nation.
Hockey changes, and remains hockey. Canada changes, and remains Canada. Go Habs Go.
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