Fans cheer outside the Bell Centre before the Montreal Canadiens face the Buffalo Sabres in Game 3 of their second-round playoff series in Montreal on Sunday.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
After Buffalo hockey fans sang O Canada through a technical glitch in the opening round, I received roughly a million e-mails from a PR firm representing Molson.
Knowing a marketable thing when they see it, Molson rushed over the border to buy everyone in a Bills jersey a beer, and then wanted every single Canadian to know about it.
Ahead of the Montreal-Buffalo matchup a “cross-border connection is already resonating,” I was told on repeat in what I imagined as a high-pitched, bossy voice.
If this whole business was a purely sporting issue, this is around the time Canada would be getting over its hurt feelings. Three months is a long time to mourn the Olympic golds that weren’t meant to be.
But this has nothing to do with sports. Sports is just the way we’re most comfortable talking about it.
There’s lots (and lots) of volume, but there’s more to Bell Centre than the noise
The Bell Centre isn’t where this began, but it’s where it spiralled. These walls can be said to contain the precise low-point of Canada-U.S. relations since the Second World War.
It was here, within the space of a half-hour on the evening of Feb. 15, 2025, that the Stars and Stripes was viciously booed, where Canada fell out for good with Wayne Gretzky and where Brandon Hagel voiced a nation’s concerns with a leading right fist.
I have covered in many things – a Russia-Poland football match at a Euros that was one badly aimed Roman candle away from becoming a 50,000-person riot leaps to mind – but none had the same atmosphere of suppressed rage as there was in this building on that night. A lot of overlooked kid brother feelings leeched to the surface all at once.
If we ever get all this unpleasantness behind us, it will be a Heritage Minute. It was the point at which America woke up to the fact that Canada doesn’t want to be friends any more.
America tried inviting everyone to Las Vegas to talk it out, but Canada didn’t show up. For the last year and a bit, America has tried to make us feel sorry for making it feel sorry by being sorry about it, though not enough to do anything.
Canadians get behind the Canadiens in their Stanley Cup bid
Thus far, it hasn’t worked, but, as Molson is anxious to remind you, Buffalo still cares. Shout out to Buffalo – the most Canadian™ place in America.
A year after going low contact with our former best friend, the only place we still run into each other regularly is at the hockey.
There is some interaction in basketball and baseball, but hockey’s where it started and where it will continue. If the NHL had a scintilla of creativity, it would have figured out a way to weave this into the league’s overarching narrative, but instead it has worked to actively suppress it. If you were a stranger to this game, you’d assume all of these guys were born in a lab floating in international waters.
Where this animus still exists is as a feeling in certain buildings – nowhere more so than this one.
On Sunday night, Buffalo got its first look in a long time at a real hockey crowd in a real hockey frenzy. In Montreal, they boo the officials before the game starts. That’s commitment to an ideal.
Quebec church becomes unlikely Habs playoff watch hub
Then they boo the announcement of the Sabres’ starting lineup. Montreal is the rare crowd which can boo as loud as it can cheer. In between, Kirk Muller walks solemnly into the arena carrying a flaming torch and the arena is bathed in Dante-esque flames. What does this have to do with playoff hockey? Nothing. That’s why it’s great.
Then they play the anthem and every one of 20,000 people belts it out in French and English.
More than any other hockey club – maybe any club, period – the Canadiens understand that the point of having a grand history is weaponizing it against your enemies. That talent for semiotics is now being put to use for the national interest.
It almost seemed part of the show when Montreal’s Cole Caufield – who’s been bone dry – somehow missed a fully empty net, and then scored a goal to give his team the lead a few moments later. The celebratory roar was physically painful to experience. Being in this room without ear protection cannot possibly be good for you. If you sat through Montreal’s 6-2 pounding of Buffalo on Sunday, a visit to an audiologist wouldn’t be the worst idea.
Is this series about our sublimated national id, and just a way to set Canada against America? No, of course not. Why would we be stupid enough to stick our heads into that bear trap? For reasons we’ve discussed ad nauseam, we’re never winning this trophy again.
Try asking a Canadian NHLer about the country’s Stanley Cup drought and you can actually see a film drop over their eyes, like an alligator.
Youthful Sabres and Canadiens set to clash in second round
Ditto anything to do with Canada-U.S. relations, or what the president said or politics, full stop. What was briefly fashionable in 2021 has returned to being absolutely verboten.
Players have stopped talking about it because, fiscally and philosophically, they’re all Wilsonian internationalists.
But the fans are never getting dealt to Washington for a second-round pick. They’re not worried about closing any doors in future aluminum tariffs.
So while no one will say that Canadian hockey is about America, it’s about America. Not just that. But that’s mixed in there for the foreseeable future.
Whether or not the Montreal Canadiens’ Canadians can beat the Buffalo Sabres’ Canadians isn’t the proof of anything. Canadian teams could fail to win a Stanley Cup for a century and that won’t make the sport American.
The new point is forcing them to listen to us in the one space where we do most of the talking. There are seven Canadian cities in the NHL. There’s the Olympics every four years. Maybe the 4 Nations Face-Off or whatever succeeds it will be a big deal again.
But regardless of the score, there is nothing like Montreal on a random night in May to make you feel like our team is winning.