Home sweet home: The Montreal Canadiens and the NHL season opener
Originally published on Rabidhabs.com magazine on Oct. 4–6, 2015
The ghosts of The Forum are long gone. They’ve been replaced, it seems, by dybbuks at the Bell Centre.
How else to explain the scheduling of NHL season openers for the Montreal Canadiens — year after year?
A dybbuk, in Jewish mythology, is an evil, possessing spirit. It’s believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person. It leaves the host body to which it has been clinging only after it accomplishes its goal.
Where the old ghosts once used their otherworldly powers to guide the Canadiens to victory in the glorious old Montreal Forum, it seems the dybbuks have clung to the breathing body of the Habs faithful and refuse any kind of exorcism. They keep starting us on the road most seasons.
This year, this Wednesday, Oct. 7 to be exact, the Habs will be on the road again to start the season. In Toronto … again.
Last year they opened in Toronto as well. Same with the three consecutive seasons from 2009–11.
In fact, the Habs have played home openers at the Bell Centre only twice in 14 seasons since the turn of the century.
Perhaps those away games were a blessing: They lost their two home openers (both to Toronto, 4–3 in 2013 and 2–1 the year before during the lockout season). Then again, they have won only six of the other 12, two of them in overtime — a middling level of success that only compares favourably against the miserable record of a team like the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Were dybbuks responsible for that losing record? Who knows.
Maybe they were to blame for forcing Habs fans to watch their team on the television set almost every season when the puck is first dropped to start the season, instead of forming the cheering throngs that rings the rink at the Bell Centre.
It wasn’t always this way.
In the history of the Montreal Canadiens leading up to the year 2000, they played a total of 91 home openers. Thirty of them were on the road, the other 61 at home.
Against Toronto (which seems to be the only team schedule organizers think the Habs should play on opening night), the Canadiens’ record during that span was 4–3 when they played at home. On the road, it plummeted to 2–6.
Looking back through the years, there were strings of season openers at home — and games won large against teams that are powerhouses in the NHL today. From 1974 to 1983, the Habs played 10 straight season openers at home. Among the victories during that stretch: 10–1 over the Pittsburgh Penguins on Oct. 7, 1976 and a 9–0 thrashing of the Los Angeles Kings on Oct. 8, 1975.
They were fun times.
Unlike the seasons of the witch otherwise known as dybbuks, they were magical times where opening night was home sweet home.
Times like Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2013 when I witnessed my first and only game in Montreal, the season opener against the Maple Leafs at the Bell Centre.
It was a time when good friends, family and fortune combined to make a 50-year-old’s dream come true. Good connections delivered a pair of tickets, my wife found an $89 per night deal at the hotel La Tour Belvedere and my children generously donated VISA points towards our airline flights.
I was sitting in one of the red seats at the Bell Centre, charged by the electricity and energy inside that building as more than 21,000 screaming, smart hockey fans took in the action.
And it was…magic — dybbuks be damned!
We arrived in Montreal via a Porter Airlines flight from Windsor, with a quick layover in the city of the enemy: Toronto.
I had been to Montreal once before, in 1982, but I was just driving through town with a friend. We went on to Quebec City where we saw the tall ships and walked the promenade along the St. Lawrence and ate French onion soup then camped our way back home.
I had never spent time in Montreal, despite an infatuation with the Montreal Canadiens that started in my teens. The only glory I shared with the team was through the television screen, like so many fans across the nation and beyond.
This year was different. My 50th birthday was approaching and generous friends and family came together to make this happen: A visit to the Bell Centre to see the opening game of the 2013–14 season.
Against the rival Toronto Maple Leafs, no less!
Does it get any better than that? (Okay, a Boston-Montreal season opener would have been pure bliss, but this has got to be a close second.)
The excitement and hope of the Habs faithful had been building. Under new GM Marc Bergevin, who signed Carey Price to a long-term contact as well as Max Pacioretty and David Desharnais the season before, the team looked like it was going places. Following a work stoppage that delayed the start of the 2012–13 season, they finished the campaign with a respectable 48–29–14 record, first in the northeast. The season ended in disappointment with a first-round exit against the Ottawa Senators, but Habs fans felt the pride was back and knew that better things would come.
I had been waiting impatiently for playoff glory. Exactly 20 years earlier, I cheered as I watched (on television) the Canadiens capture their 24th Stanley Cup with a victory over Wayne Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings. A few months later, I celebrated my 30th birthday and received Habs memorabilia as many gifts — but no tickets to see them in person.
But Oct. 1, 2013 was only one day away and I was in Montreal — home sweet home of the Habs. I was going to the Bell Centre to see them live.
I settled with my wife into our room at the hotel La Tour Belvedere. It was actually a converted apartment with a kitchenette. Cute, but aged and in need of upkeep. It would do.
After putting away our luggage, I walked out on the balcony of our second floor room at our “hotel apartment” and looked out over Maisonneuve Boulevard. I turned my head to the right. I saw the words on the side of the building a short distance away.
“My God, it’s the Forum!” I blurted out to my wife.
We wasted no time getting our shoes and walking to Rue Lambert Closse then over to Rue Ste-Catherine. Within minutes, we were standing outside the Forum and I felt…
Confused. This couldn’t be the place, could it?
Then I felt cheated when I realized it was the place.
This building, with its hallowed halls of greatness, was reduced to a nondescript shell. You could hardly tell it was the Forum.
Inside, a small section showed the remains of parts of this great shrine, including a hallway full of photos. Below, some workers were setting up a small squash court in the shape of a mini Forum. One of them was nice enough to let us pass beyond some yellow tape and pose next to a cheering Canadiens’ fan and a sculpture of Rocket Richard.
But most signs of the greatness of this former home of hockey were gone and it felt like a letdown. I had to ask a couple of people if this was indeed the Forum.
For a team that celebrates its history with something approaching veneration, how could they let it come to this? We don’t let cathedrals crumble to ruins. Why the Forum?
The revelation wasn’t helped much by all the infrastructure problems along Ste.-Catherine. There were steel grates covering parts of sidewalk and crumbling buildings and streets. The front page of the Montreal Gazette identified it a major issue in the upcoming municipal election.
I wasn’t the only one to feel the disappointment. Two years later, Sean McIndoe was underwhelmed when he took in the playoffs, writing this of Game 5 of the Habs-Lightning second round series last year:
“The 20-minute walk from the Bell Centre to the site of the old Forum involves cutting across to Rue Sainte-Catherine, and the trip is … well, ugly isn’t the right word, but it’s not fun. It’s not much to look at, mostly uphill, and half the route seems to be under construction.”
As for the Forum itself, McIndoe wrote it is now a movie theatre.
“I’d describe it further, but I don’t really need to, because if you’ve ever been in a modern movie theater, with its generic popcorn lines and self-serve kiosks and unused arcade games, then you’ve got the picture. On Saturday, if you didn’t feel like watching Game 5 at the Bell Centre, there was always Furious 7 at the Forum.”
He went on:
“There are reminders of where you really are. There’s a small memorabilia store where you can pay $149 for ‘new’ bricks from the original Forum, which sounds impressive until you realize that means some-body is still pulling bricks out of the building you’re currently standing in. They’ve painted a faceoff circle on the floor where center ice used to be, and even put a few rows of original seating around it, but the seats are too close, so the view is all wrong. The whole thing is all wrong.
“The Forum is a movie theater. That shouldn’t be depressing, but it is. If you’re a hockey fan and you ever have the chance to make that 20-minute walk back through history, I recommend you don’t take it.”
It sucked. But still, we took in whatever little bits of history we could. Posing for pictures, reading plaques on walls and team photos, looking over the scaled-down version of the Forum rink. Imagining the applause and seeing all those moments of glory pass before your eyes like a movie reel, from black and white to colour. Somewhere inside this building, there may still be a ghost or two.
But we only had so much time for nostalgia. There were other parts of town to explore and, the next day, a game to catch. In the heart of downtown Montreal, past higher-end shops and bustling city life in a place called the Bell Centre. The new shrine of hockey in (sorry Detroit) the real Hockeytown at the heart of (sorry Toronto) Habs Nation.
I was going to see my Canadiens take on the Leafs. The Forum would soon be forgotten.
How can you possibly describe the city of Montreal on a balmy fall day like this October 1st, 2013, the season opener between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Canadiens?
Habs jerseys rule here. Everywhere, it seems, people wear the Bleu, Blanc et Rouge on their sleeves…and backs and arms and heads and legs and feet. Even old guys. I saw one grey-haired fan with a Canadiens jersey and a jacket, a Habs backpack and a bunch of stuffed animals — all with the team’s logo. Later, I saw another old guy on his bicycle on Rue Ste. Catherine in front of the old Forum, a former hockey cathedral that in its desecrated state disappointed me so much the day before. He was wearing a Go Habs jersey.
You also never know who you’re going to run into here, where hockey is the only game in town. The front desk worker at the “hotel apartment” we stayed at, La Tour Belvedere, told me he used to be coached by the legendary Doug Harvey back in his thinner, hockey-playing days.
On the way to the Bell Centre, a trickle of fans soon became a flood lapping up against the front doors. Music was belting out over the loudspeakers, TV cameras hovered over the crowds milling about and Guy Lafleur and Yvan Cournoyer were signing autographs.
My wife and I had dinner at the St. Hubert restaurant next to the Bell Centre, where every table was filled with fans wearing Habs jerseys and hats just like us.
Inside the Bell Centre, with time still left to kill before the puck dropped, we explored the hallways of history. I approached a bronze plaque of Patrick Roy with reverence, wearing my No. 31 Carey Price jersey. A giant wall display proudly proclaimed “100 Ans de Fierté” — 100 Years of Pride.
The reverberations of the endless 100th anniversary season celebration were still carrying on, both off and on the ice. Lafleur carried the torch inside the arena and handed it to newly acquired Daniel Briere who, in turn, handed it to each teammate leading up to captain Brian Gionta. It was dramatic, but I couldn’t help but think that the players felt awkward playing part in this marketing department’s pageantry of history, when all they wanted to do was just get down to the present day and playing hockey.
I found myself agreeing with a Facebook friend, and Maple Leafs’ fan, who posted: “Enough of the torch and let’s get the game going!”
Sitting inside the Bell Centre during the season opener approaches the surreal. You look up to see jerseys — so many jerseys — and Stanley Cup banners — so many banners — hanging high from the rafters. The noise and the lights are electric. The buzz of conversations all around you, intelligent commentary, in both official languages, adds to the energy. That torch that touches centre ice and sets the entire rink ablaze.
The opening ceremony over, we stood to sing the national anthem — the only anthem tonight, for this is an all-Canadian affair between two of the oldest rivals in hockey. The crowd of 21,273 sang along to the music and then it was just us, our voices suspended above the ice a cappella. No music or amplified singer’s voice.
The puck dropped and it was game on. Toronto struck first but the Canadiens responded on a goal by Lars Eller, his first of two on the night. Then Brendan Gallagher struck to make it 2–1. Toronto tied the game in the second and jumped ahead late in the period on a shorthanded breakaway following an uncharacteristic flub by Andrei Markov.
The Canadiens came out listlessly in the third and it took a fourth Toronto goal, after Raphael Diaz coughed up the puck, to wake them up. That and a clash of titans that ended up sucking a collective breaths out of the crowd when it looked like George Parros was seriously injured (or worse) in a battle against Maple Leaf goon Colton Orr. Parros fell awkwardly to the ice during the scrap, face down into the Bell Centre ice, and trainers worked on him for several minutes before he was able to get on his feet and leave the rink.
I thought: If this is the price to pay to watch my team live — to see a human being killed in combat — then I don’t want to have any of it. I could only imagine how the Bell Centre crowd felt after watching the Boston Bruins’ Zdeno Chara nearly decapitate Max Pacioretty in 2011.
Down 4–3 after Eller’s goal, the Habs made it a game and almost tied it but were denied by James Reimer’s heroics.
Game one of the 2013–14 season — my one and only time watching my beloved Habs live, a season that sizzled into the conference finals, then fizzled as Montreal fell to the New York Rangers and failed to advance to the Stanley Cup finals — would go down as a loss.
It was only a game, the first of a long season. But it would have been so special to have cheered them on to victory, especially since a season opener at the Bell Centre is such a rare event most years.
Back at La Tour Belvedere where we headed to our room for the night, the attendant was matter-of-fact: “There’s no joy in Mudville tonight.”
***
Epilogue
So much of Montreal seemed in decay on that visit nearly two years ago.
The infrastructure was in rough shape and had been a municipal election issue. The old Forum was less than a shell of the hockey cathedral I thought it would be, a shadow of its former glory. It should have been treated as a heritage site; instead, it became a patchwork of different businesses and uses with a nondescript exterior.
But there was a vibrancy, an energy to the town. Youthful vigour was everywhere: in the students you see all over the streets, in cafes and park benches, the subway riders, the bicyclists riding the dedicated, protected lanes like the one in front of our hotel on Blvd. de Maisonneuve, a short jaunt from the Forum.
The sea of Bleu-Blanc-Rouge washed over the island and it felt so good to be carried along with it — me, a Habs fan living in the city of Windsor where all around me are Detroit Red Wing and Toronto Maple Leafs fans.
It especially felt good to be a part of this night, celebrating a milestone birthday, watching my Habs at home. My spiritual home.
Those dybbuks that I think have moved into the Bell Centre — the evil, possessing spirits of Jewish mythological lore that must be behind the NHL schedule-makers decisions to make the Canadiens start most seasons on the road (almost always in Toronto) — were defied on this night. It was only the second time in the 13 seasons up to then that Montreal played their first game at home and we were in the throes of ecstasy.
We didn’t care about old ghosts or dybbuks. We still revered the history of the Habs, sure, but it was only the present that mattered and the Canadiens were wearing their red jerseys and battling Toronto in white.
Oct. 7, 2015, they’ll be playing the Leafs again but in Toronto. Again.
It’s time to bring it the season opener home again. It’s time to send the dybbuks back to hell, where they belong.
Claudio D’Andrea has been a journalist for 30 years, writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
