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In February, 1971, a slightly bewildered boy stood beside his father in the Montreal Forum as waves of applause tumbled over them.

The ovation lasted 10 minutes, an unbridled display of gratitude from Canadiens fans who had just seen the team's legendary captain, Jean Béliveau, score his third goal of the night and the 500th of his career.

The cheering fans in the better seats were the picture of Montreal elegance. Women wore fancy hats and good dresses, and the men were in suits. Higher in the arena, the standing-room-only diehards wore Habs jerseys emblazoned with their favourite players' numbers. They led the crowd in chants; between faceoffs, when the organ usually remained silent, one well-known regular with a trumpet blew a fanfare – da-da-da-DA-da-DAH – that the fans would follow with the English cry, “Charge!” Other times, everyone sang out, “Les Canadiens sont là!”

But the real show was on the ice. When a defenceman made a crisp, rink-wide pass that was picked up on the backhand by a winger in full flight, the true connoisseurs meted out a knowing little clap. There was rarely any booing; much of the game passed in muted appreciation as the crowd focused on the action.

The Canadiens beat the Minnesota North Stars that night. And they went on to win the Stanley Cup that spring. For an 11-year-old English-speaking Montreal boy, the world unfolded that night as it always had. He sat beside his father on the drive home clutching the game program and feeling immense pride in his team and his city. Seeing Mr. Béliveau's 500th would be something to boast about at school in the morning.

For a grown man now approaching 50 and living in Toronto, that memory has become more than nostalgia: It's a link to a place left behind, an indisputable claim to Montrealer-hood made by a self-exiled anglophone.

The team, which begins its 100th regular season next week, is intimately bound up with the political and social history of Quebec, and with the memories and personal identities of its fans.

In a province where who you are and where you come from are everything, the Canadiens are a shared totem.

The team has changed, though, and so has Montreal. The city whose English elite invented the game is a place where the English community has been legislated into retreat.

There's no going back, either for anglophones or the Habs. There is today about as much chance of the team building another dynasty as there is of Westmount restoring itself as an all-English enclave.

Storied legacy

The Canadiens were founded on Dec. 4, 1909, with the goal of providing Montreal's French population with a team to cheer in the Eastern Canadian Hockey Association, D'Arcy Jenish recounts in The Montreal Canadians: 100 Years of Glory, a new unofficial history being released next week by Doubleday Canada.

It is the oldest and most storied franchise in the National Hockey League. The team has won as many Stanley Cups (24) as its closest rivals combined (Toronto's 13 and Detroit's 11).

But on close inspection, those “100 years of glory” are actually a 27-season stretch of great teams, book-ended by long periods of average performance.

The Canadiens won 16 of their 24 Stanley Cups, and were in the finals three other times, from 1953 to 1979. That sustained burst of success is unparalleled in North American sports history, and it defines the Habs. It certainly created the unrealistic impression in the mind of a boy that winning a major sports championship was a matter of course for one's home team.

The period also produced three consecutive French-Canadians stars who were not only dazzling 500-goal scorers but who were also remarkable men in their own right: Maurice Richard, Jean Béliveau and Guy Lafleur.

Each one reflected his era – the working-class “Rocket” Richard, whose 1955 suspension in the playoffs led to a riot that some say was the noisy opening salvo of Quebec's Quiet Revolution; the self-assured gentleman, Mr. Béliveau, who became maître chez lui by holding out for a then-massive $100,000, five-year contract from his English-speaking boss; and the flashy disco-era star, Mr. Lafleur, who carried a rapidly changing province's expectations on his shoulders.

The outrageous successes of the 1950s to 1970s were the legacy of Frank Selke Jr., the general manager hired by the Canadiens in 1946 after he left the same job with the Leafs. Mr. Selke built a vast farm-team system that began paying off in the 1950s, producing powerhouse lineups.

“By 1950, the Canadiens were spending $150,000 per season on player development, a figure that would eventually reach $200,000 per season,” Mr. Jenish writes. Other teams simply couldn't – or simply didn't – match it.

The Canadiens system also developed two great coaches: Toe Blake and Scotty Bowman. The two of them won 13 of those 16 championships. And the team produced a natural in-house successor to Mr. Selke in Sam Pollock, who took over as general manager in 1964.

Mr. Pollock became a master of the draft system when it was imposed after expansion in 1967, trading for first-round picks that landed him Guy Lafleur and Larry Robinson in 1971.

He also signed goaltender Ken Dryden, who won six Stanley Cups in an eight-season career (and is now running for his third term as MP for the Toronto riding of York Centre).

Mr. Pollock forged a team good enough to outplay the fearsome Soviet Red Army team in a memorable exhibition game on New Year's Eve, 1975, that ended in a 3-3 tie only because of the goaltending of Vladislav Tretiak.

In the diluted NHL, winning four Stanley Cups in a row, starting the following spring, was comparatively easy. In the 1976-77 season, the Habs lost just eight regular-season games; in four consecutive best-of-seven final series, they lost only three games.

And then it all went downhill. Or returned to the pre-1953 normal, depending on your perspective. A weakened farm system and a revolving door of players, coaches and management, so typical of the modern NHL, have taken their tolls. The media scrutiny of the team's performance, especially in the French press, has been merciless, prompting some francophone stars to avoid joining the Montreal team.

Over all, the post-1980 Canadiens haven't done much worse than most NHL teams, but they haven't done much better, either. They made it to the finals three times and won twice, which puts them in the middle of the pack.

But today's Canadiens are a offer a product that is indistinguishable from those of the 29 other franchises in the NHL.

Now, the show happens when the play stops. The PA system blasts loud rock music every time the whistle blows, and instead of a guy with a bugle, garish lights and graphics urge the crowd to yell “Charge!”

The fans are different too, complains Robert Fisher, a lifelong Habs follower and former sportswriter and newspaper publisher in Lachine, Que.

“We've become Toronto Maple Leaf fans,” he said this week. “We're lost in the futility of the team and live in the hope that it will regain the past.”

Reflected failure

Sports psychologists have acronyms to describe the ways fans handle the ups and downs of their teams' fortunes: BIRGing (basking in reflected glory); and CORFing (casting off reflected failure).

Habs fans in their late 40s or older binge BIRGed for decades. It was easy: All you had to do was open the morning paper. Was the team in first place? Check. Were linemates Guy Lafleur, Steve Shutt and Jacques Lemaire at the top of the scoring race? Check. Did Mr. Dryden have the lowest goals-against average? Check.

The 1960s and 1970s were a fabulous time to grow up in Montreal: The city hosted first Expo 67 and then the 1976 Olympics, and it had the greatest hockey team in the world.

But that veneer of success lay on top of revolutionary social upheaval, with the October Crisis in 1970 and the rise of separatism as a mainstream political movement. An English kid growing up in Westmount got used to his team winning the Stanley Cup, but he also got to know the peculiar siren of the police bomb squad and the sight of armed Canadian soldiers guarding his neighbours' front doors.

By the late 1970s, everything had changed. The Parti Québécois was in power and English-speaking Quebeckers had left the province by the tens of thousands. Montreal's economy began to slide, and the Habs began to be average.

Some fans probably began CORFing. In marketing terms, that's when it gets harder for losing franchises to sell tickets and T-shirts. But as a psychological process, it's the great privilege of being a fan.

If you are not pathologically attached to your home team, you can walk away. Alternatively, you can realign your attachment the way fans of perennial losers such as the Chicago Cubs or the post-expansion Toronto Maple Leafs have done – by bonding around their teams' permanent futility.

“Picking out virtues where you can find them ... enables the fan to construct an adaptive narrative of hope that maintains convictions in the presence of undermining evidence – particularly when the narrative is shared among a large cadre of fans,” Jordan Grafman, a Maryland neuropsychologist, writes in Your Brain on Cub s, a recent collection of essays by neuroscientists and psychologists about the hapless Chicago Cubs and their unwavering supporters.

The Montreal Canadiens, it turns out, are not a team a disappointed, long-distance fan can just walk away from. The parts of the brain that create identity around family, community and work also come into play in fandom, Dr. Grafman says. When family ties are broken and people leave their old communities, a team can become the most powerful source of identity still intact.

“People look to sports teams to tighten the fabric that's been loosened by breaking from the family,” he says.

The real glory of the Montreal Canadiens, then, may be that the team has created that remarkable thing: a common narrative among the tribes of Quebeckers who share little else when it comes to identity.

The French, the English and now the so-called allophones – new immigrants – do not see the province in the same way. But it's a well-established fact that a shared love of the Habs can trump most linguistic or cultural barriers.

And now, as the 2008 season dawns, love is in the air again. The team finished a surprising first in the NHL's Northeast Division last season, and the ownership has embraced the kind of long-term management that can produce sustained success.

As Mr. Jenish writes in his final paragraph, “The resurrection of hockey's greatest organization is complete in all but one essential. The faithful are awaiting that spring day when the leaves are out, when Mount Royal is green, when the St. Lawrence sparkles in the sunshine and the city holds a parade down Ste-Catherine Street …”

There is not a Habs fan anywhere who would disagree with that. But even if it never happens, one little boy will always have that night at the Forum when he basked in the reflected glory of the greatest hockey team ever.

Peter Scowen is an editor with The Globe and Mail.