MONTREAL — A monthlong playoff surge has produced civic euphoria across Montreal, with an arena hosting a 21,000-person Game 7 watch party and scenes of fans overflowing bars and streets, the article reported.
The Canadiens, described as the youngest team in the league, have advanced to a Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals and were tied 1-1 entering Monday night’s home contest against Carolina, the article said. The club won Game 7s in the opposing arenas of Tampa and Buffalo in earlier rounds, and the article noted home teams went a combined 0-8 in Games 4 through 7 in those series.
The city’s reaction has been visible: flags rippling from car windows, “Go Habs Go” on electronic bus signs and a large banner circling the airport’s air traffic control tower, the article said. Fans were spotted wearing jerseys bearing names such as Hutson, Suzuki, Caufield, Gallagher, Slafkovsky and Price, and packed pubs showed only the low hum of play-by-play on screens as people watched games together.
The playoff run has been marked by multigenerational enthusiasm. Brendan Kelly, author of Habs Nation: A People’s History of the Montreal Canadiens, said, “I really think there’s more excitement than there ever has been about a Habs playoff run,” the article reported. The piece highlighted how fandom is passed down family trees and how what a Montrealer has seen in hockey is often determined by when they were born.
The article placed the current celebration in historical context: the Canadiens have won 24 Stanley Cups, including 18 of 41 between 1953 and 1993. The city is also marked by a 33-year Cup drought that includes 13 missed playoffs, 10 first-series exits, four conference finals (including the current one) and one Stanley Cup Final — the latter occurring amid the oddities of the COVID-19 season of 2021, according to the article.
