Richard, Béliveau and the Habs: Both Canadian and better than Canadian.
When the Montreal Canadiens gather at the Bell Centre tonight, they will be celebrating not just the centenary of the most successful club in the history of hockey. They will be celebrating a national institution.
Le Club de hockey Canadien was founded in Montreal on Dec. 4, 1909. Who knew the illustrious story it would write? In winning again and again, in innovating, adapting and enduring, in personifying grace and guts, the Canadiens have shaped our national game. Moreover, as a dynastic team with political, social and religious overtones, the Canadiens have become part of our iconography.
It begins with their success. Over the past century, the Canadiens have won 24 championships, often with a consistency unimaginable today. They won five consecutive times in the 1950s and four consecutive times in both the 1960s and the 1970s.
In dominating the game, they defined it. They introduced the mask (Jacques Plante), popularized the slap-shot (Boom Boom Geoffrion) and exemplified "fire-wagon hockey" with such explosive offence that the league rewrote the rules on the power play.
Fundamentally, though, it was the way they played. The Canadiens were panache itself, carrying the puck with elegance and artistry. This was typical of the players who wore le bleu, blanc et rouge. They were gods to their acolytes and, in their prime, that was most of Canada. (In a poll this week, 33 per cent of Canadians called them our national team; 24 per cent chose the Toronto Maple Leafs.)
There was the stocky, mobile Doug Harvey; the impassioned Howie Morenz; the speedy Yvan Cournoyer; the craggy Henri Richard; the lanky Larry Robinson; the mercurial Jacques Lemaire; the tentacled Ken Dryden.
In our mind's eye, we still see these Olympians at the Forum. We see Guy Lafleur, hair askew, rushing straight down the ice. We see Jean Béliveau, wheeling away, seeming to float above the fray - unperturbed, a sea of calm. He once scored three goals in 44 seconds.
And we see Maurice Richard, crazed and incendiary, who mesmerized goalies with his eyes and paralyzed defenders with his strength. He once scored five goals in one game.
Forty-five per cent of Canadians think he was the greatest Canadien. How do they possibly remember? The Rocket retired in 1960, yet his legend endures, perhaps because he stood at the intersection of sports and politics. He caused a riot. In a less genteel time, he represented the rise of nationalism in Quebec and the uneasy relationship between English and French.
For the most part, though, the Canadiens have exemplified a collaboration of our founding peoples, speaking each other's language, accepting each other's reality, adjusting, accommodating, succeeding. In a country of few unifying institutions, they are one.
In many ways, though, they are not only us, but better than us. They have no identity crisis. They have no resentment, jealousy, pettiness, self-doubt or ambiguity - all Canadian traits - and they show no moderation in their pursuit of excellence. They see no solitudes. They know where they came from. Their banners, pennants and pictures are our national portrait gallery.
Oh, to have grown up in Montreal a generation ago, when the Canadiens were soaring. Our little lives turned on the exploits of Les Glorieux. One childhood memory: listening to a playoff game in bed late at night, clandestinely, scratchy transistor radio pressed to the ear, perspiring under the covers, stifling whoops of joy when the Habs scored.
The Forum was famously a shrine and, in Catholic Quebec, the Canadiens were clothed in ecclesiastical imagery. When they left the Forum in the 1990s, even heathens thought their departure an act of desecration, if not deconsecration.
In life, fathers wish many things for their children. For me, a child of the Canadiens, it is that my son and daughter savour, if only for a moment, something of the glory that we did.
To see the Canadiens win the Stanley Cup, as they did in 1971, the greatest upset of them all. To hear the voice of Danny Gallivan, for whom language was art. To feel the ovations at Atwater and Ste-Catherine after a goal in sudden death overtime, when the rafters would shake, the horns blare, the organ roar and the world turn blindingly, quietly incandescent.
This was our team. It was also Canada's team. It enthralled us and inspired us.
For a hundred years, win or lose, the Canadiens have represented what we are. For a hundred years, they have also represented what we might be. For that we cherish them.
Andrew Cohen is a journalist and author of The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are. He is president of the Historica-Dominion Institute.