Generations of Canadiens fans loving this playoff run: ‘Every win is magical’

MONTREAL — Consider some of Earth’s utmost cases of a civic euphoria spawned from the peerless force of sports. Daydream of Paris on the night of Sunday, July 12, 1998, just after the happy shock of France 3, Brazil 0. Think of Philadelphia on Feb. 4, 2018 (Super Bowl LII), or the gigantic Mumbai on April 2, 2011 (Cricket World Cup), or, best yet, Johannesburg on June 24, 1995, and a stadium boasting both a Rugby World Cup final and Nelson Mandela.

Now, wander into Montreal in May 2026 and find a monthlong rival to all of the above, a great city gone greater, as if its bloodstream long filled with little Canadiens logos has imported a fresh dose of electricity. Hear one of the world’s great sounds on a Monday night as it whooshes outward and upward from an arena where 21,000 people have gone for a Game 7 watch party and know an overtime goal has occurred even before the broadcast you’re watching has finished its several-second delay. Hear one of the world’s great non-sounds while hopscotching through 12 bars in four neighborhoods during a Game 1 on a Thursday night: that of pubs packed with people so immersed that the only sound is the low hum of the play-by-play coming from all the screens.

Feel Montreal as the place-to-be on Earth right now, as its magic feelings include something it seldom got to feel while it won a peerless 24 Stanley Cups including an absurd 18 of the 41 between 1953 and 1993: surprise. Watch it exhibit love for an irresistible youngest team in the league that supposedly had this kind of push earmarked for later in its multiseason agenda. Instead, this team has pushed all the way to a giddy Game 3 in the Eastern Conference finals, tied 1-1 entering Monday night’s home contest against Carolina. And this team has won Game 7s in the opposing arenas of Tampa and Buffalo, in two wild series where the home teams spent Games 4 through 7 going a combined 0-8. See the Habs flags rippling from the car windows, the “Go Habs Go” on the electronic signs of city buses, and, good grief, the giant banner newly ringing the air traffic control tower at the airport. (Get a window seat!) Stand at a single corner on a Saturday evening amid jerseys marked HUTSON, SUZUKI, CAUFIELD, GALLAGHER, SLAFKOVSKY, PRICE (throwback!), another HUTSON, another SUZUKI.

Pass a hotel with a wedding during Game 2, the valet parking marked for “Sara and Charles” — congratulations! — and overhear one valet say to another, “It’s 1-1 right now.” Hear the podcaster and writer Brendan Kelly, the author of “Habs Nation: A People’s History of the Montreal Canadiens,” as he says, “You know what? The thing is, I’ve been saying” — to pushback from some wrinkled sorts — “I really think there’s more excitement than there ever has been about a Habs playoff run.” And know the whole goose-bumpy moment rings with one of the most enduring, endearing aspects of sports, how fandom is passed down family trees from generation to generation, and how in sports, when you were born mandates what you have seen.

WHEN WERE YOU BORN? If you’re a Montrealer and the answer is 1988 or later, you probably don’t remember even one Cup, which calls to mind another thing coursing through that bloodstream alongside the merriment and the beer: the hint of the end of a drought now yawning at 33 springs. Those 33 include 13 playoffs missed altogether and 10 first-series exits, with only four conference finals (including this one) and one Stanley Cup Final (but amid the oddities of the COVID-19 season of 2021). Yet even as you’ve beheld zero Cups, you seem to know the meaning of the history of a team felt as deeply as deeply felt gets, and you know it probably better than any young fans anywhere know any history that precedes their births. “It was much bigger than the sport,” Montrealer Nicholas Bergeron, 35, said of way back in the middle of the last century when French Canadians, so outnumbered on a continent, got tired of being bossed and belittled by the Anglos. “Even though this was 50, 60, 70 years ago, these things are still felt. People know about this. The lore was passed down. It’s more than hockey history at this point. … That knowledge has been hammered for years. I think everybody knows that everybody knows the history.” He gathered it mostly from his late grandfather, Jacques Laurin, a non-loquacious man who coached Nicholas through the atom, peewee, bantam and midget levels until Nicholas grew up to say of him, “I think he would be delighted with these young players.”

Lukas Drouin, born in 1988, with “zero” memories of the 1993 Cup, used to hear from his father about 1955, about how the league’s suspension of Maurice “Rocket” Richard for the remainder of a season helped birth a riot, a movement and a dynasty. Among Drouin’s early vivid memories are Game 6 with his father in Bell Centre in late April 2002 against Boston in the first round, the wizardly save from goalie Jose Theodore. “It felt like something magical was happening,” Drouin said. Now he sat yet again next to his father, Mark, 68, on a Saturday night in Girouard Park in the neighborhood Notre-Dame-de-Grace in the West End, watching a Game 2 overtime loss to Carolina on a huge screen among about 600 like-minded souls who sighed at the end. “And that’s what I think everybody’s so addicted about now: It feels like it’s magical,” Lukas Drouin said, “like every win is magical, and it’s giving so much energy to the people and the fans.”

Melissa Delisle, born in 1999, grew up with a father she called a “huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge” hockey person, huge enough that after 1993 he painted his car roof like the ice, with blue lines and faceoff circles and such. She remembers herself as “the only girl playing hockey in the school in the lunchtime,” and she tells of the history project she wrote to close secondary school — about hockey, of course — and she feels the history flaring again even if technically she can’t feel the history at all. She wishes she could see it in her late father’s eyes even as in a very real way she can see it in her late father’s eyes. “It’s happening in every street, every restaurant, cafe, bar, everything, every living room across Montreal and Quebec,” she said, soon adding, “Even my grandmother, she called me and she was like, ‘Meli, I need a flag to put on my car.'”

Fifty-one years after the writer Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) authored a famous Esquire essay with a sub-headline that called the Canadiens “a spiritual necessity,” and long since Mayor Jean Drapeau so famously would say, “The Canadiens’ parade will follow the usual route,” Sunil Peetush said this: “It truly is a religion. There’s a lot to it: There’s the political aspect, there’s a religious aspect [long intertwined with the Catholic Church], there’s the language aspect.” It’s telltale that Peetush can say such things, for he represents another large strand of the great May 2026: the fan by way of immigration — or, in his case, the superfan.

Born in Montreal in 1978 to parents who had skipped from India to West Berlin to Canada by 1969, Peetush grasped his first chunk of magic at age 8 in 1986, when a friend and that friend’s father took him to that particular Cup parade (and usual route). He has gone on to grasp volumes more in knowledge and the whoa amount of memorabilia he keeps in his “HabsCave,” with its 500-plus Patrick Roy autographs on various surfaces, its real seats from the old Forum, its astounding collection of sticks, its occasional visits from actual Canadiens. Now all of that passion starts its trip down the generations. With his 13-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son, he said, “I am constantly talking about the history of the team.” Lately, as the Czech goalie Jakub Dobes has surged across two seasons from unknown to beloved, came this exchange:

Children: “Did we have Jakub Dobes at our house last year?”

Dad: “Yeah, he was here, spent the afternoon.”

“I THINK WHAT’S EXTRAORDINARY HERE,” said Kelly, the “Habs Nation” author, “and the buzz is so off-the-charts, is that an entire generation” is getting a turn. Of his 25-year-old son and the son’s friends, Kelly said, “They are losing their minds.”

They’re losing them for a franchise whose legends not only dominated the game but furthered it, as the great sportswriter and Montrealer Michael Farber notes: Jacques Plante with his goalie mask, to Ken Dryden with his thinking, to Patrick Roy with his butterfly technique, to Doug Harvey with his defense, Rocket Richard with his offense, Jean Beliveau from center, Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion with his snap shot. Yet they’re also losing it for an infectious team with, as Melissa Delisle puts it, “heart, with grit and kind of a brotherhood you can actually feel.” A fanbase long repelled by the word “rebuilding” is loving even the rebuilding itself, as when Peetush says of the team architects, executive vice president Jeff Gorton and general manager Kent Hughes, “They’ve let us in on their path, their process. They’ve been honest with us.” From a 20th century rich in legends who hailed from Quebec and ratified the competitive value of that biographical detail, through an era of debate about the necessity of having Quebecois players as their number ebbed and the sport itself grew more international, here’s a beloved roster with nine nationalities — and six players born in Quebec.

“One of the reasons this particular team is so well-liked,” Farber said, “is the hockey has been dreadfully dull for a while. There’s been so much soporific hockey. This team has such skill. A 50-goal scorer [Cole Caufield] for the first time in forever [since Stephane Richer in 1989], a 100-point scorer [Nick Suzuki] for the first time in forever [since Mats Naslund in 1986]. It’s exciting hockey, and Montreal fancies itself as a city with flair and style.”

And so, says the New Jersey native who became a Montrealer in 1979, Farber: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this: How many of them are now on commercials, and most of them on French commercials. Suddenly they’re everywhere, and before, you just didn’t see that. They are all over because they are likable pitchmen.”

It feels not only like something is great, but that it might stay great. Said Drouin, the one born in 1988, “I’m reading a lot of pieces saying that people from my age never saw greatness from the Habs, and this is like the first, maybe, core [of players] that’s promising something great. It’s special because our generation, we never had something — like I read another piece that’s saying all the greats that we watched, like [Saku] Koivu, [Alex] Kovalev, [Mike] Cammalleri, [Max] Pacioretty” — or the beloved P.K. Subban — “they didn’t have those stats like this year: 51 goals, 100 points. The future is bright. And it’s so exciting. I’m so excited for the future, and it’s really cool to see how this group is growing.”

SO BY ALL MEANS, rate Montreal in May 2026 among the notable sports euphorias of the eras, which is not even to mention that it had an F1 race tossed into town this past Sunday, so that every once in a while you’d come across a city block with an F1 car with the fascinated gathered round. See the vivid streams of red attire moving across the green Place du Canada park downtown. Hear the horns honking for hours after a Game 7 overtime whew. Watch the people gush out of their TV-watching party in the arena, so many of the faces unvisited by any aging process, waiting for street-crossing lights while singing, “Ole, Ole, Ole.” Hear the real hope as when Nicholas Bergeron says, “If the Habs win [the Cup], I don’t think there’s going to be any people in houses.”

Note the doorman at the central Peel Pub before a Game 1 against Carolina saying, “You have a reservation? Fully packed.” See the McLean’s Pub beers of Wembanyama height. Stand outside Ye Olde Orchard Pub and hear the reaction to an opening goal ripple up the sidewalk of Rue de la Montagne. Talk outside Ziggy’s Pub to Schubi Joseph, who immigrated from Dominica as a child in 1975 and who wears a vintage jacket he received from a man who got it from a grandmother who said to give it to the first person who complimented it. “I’m the last guy you see [in the parade photo of 1993], little head, that’s me,” Joseph said.

Go to McKibbin’s Irish Pub and hear the mild groan after a goal that narrows a lead from 4-1 to 4-2. Head up to the Le Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood and to Barfly, with the Jean Beliveau photo presiding from the left corner inside, and listen to the mild screaming over Carolina threats on the Montreal net. Proceed to the neighborhood bar La Remise on hushed streets and hear the applause at the end of a 6-2 win in a Game 1. Go to Bruno Sport Bar with the aftermath in progress, “Sandstorm!” blasting out through the door, fans in jerseys all over the sidewalk gabbing and then coach Martin St. Louis’ postgame news conference audible out there with, “I think we played to our identity tonight.”

For a Game 2, hear a woman on the street who doesn’t give her name say she prays to Guy Lafleur and add, “This is a chance for us to be together.” Make it to the shiny Time Out Market with its humongous screen in the Eaton mall with the 1977 Gilles Villeneuve Ferrari hanging out just down the escalator. Feel happy to inhabit a sporting planet. And then, sweeping across town from the excellent Chez Miller with its Christmas tree lights and its brick walls in The Village to the 600 strong in Girouard Park, listen to Drouin say of his Montreal, “I think for passion and just living life, it’s the best city in the world.”

Other cities might quibble on some days, but surely not today.