Column: Canadiens, boasting a heroic past, are contenders again as Kings hit Montreal

From Montreal —  Reminders of the Canadiens’ glorious past are inescapable here, which can be a blessing and a burden to those who wear the classic bleu, blanc et rouge of the NHL’s oldest team.

Banners in the Bell Centre commemorating the Canadiens’ 24 Stanley Cup championships — including one before the NHL was born — publicly proclaim there’s a standard to uphold, an excellence demanded. That idea is reinforced to players through a gallery of photographs lining the walls of their locker room. Jacques Plante is next to Henri Richard, who’s next to Gump Worsley, who’s next to Frank Mahovlich, who’s next to Yvon Cournoyer, who’s next to Ken Dryden and so on — all Hall of Famers. They are, figuratively, watching over every player’s shoulder every day.

“I remember when I got drafted, I was sitting down with my dad and he told me he came here as a young boy to watch hockey with his family,” defenseman Nathan Beaulieu said. “It’s just such an amazing, unique opportunity that I have, to play in this organization.”

His experience is unique in another and more startling way: Beaulieu, 23, is part of a generation that has no personal memory of seeing the Canadiens become champions.

Think about it. The Canadiens won the Cup for the first time in 1916 and triumphed at least once in every subsequent decade through 1993, when they defeated Wayne Gretzky, Luc Robitaille and the Kings. Since then they’ve endured a drought unprecedented in a city that once took their success so much for granted that everyone knew what it meant when Jean Drapeau, the mayor in the 1970s, said in annual planning briefings that the Stanley Cup parade would follow its usual route.

No other Canada-based team has won since then, either, a topic of much anguish north of the border every spring. But no other team has so strong a cultural bond with fans as the Canadiens have in this predominantly French city, a tie so deep that a professor on the faculty of theology and religious studies at the University of Montreal not long ago taught a course called “Hockey as a Religion: The Montreal Canadiens.”

Robitaille, 49, was born in Montreal and went on to become a Hall of Fame player and Kings executive. He began following the Canadiens in the late 1970s, when they often toyed with opponents. “They won like every year. They won four years in a row,” he said of teams that lost 11 games in 1975-76, eight in 1976-77, 10 in 1977-78 and a comparatively bad 17 in 1978-79. “Growing up, I thought they won every year. I didn’t know any better.”

Writer Marc de Foy of the French-language Journal de Montreal, who has covered the team for 34 seasons, first saw them win the Cup in 1965 to start an era of 10 championships in 15 seasons. “There was a parade almost every year,” he said. “The years they didn’t win, you couldn’t go anywhere without being asked, ‘What happened this year?’”

The Canadiens have a chance to add another Cup banner this season. They led the league with a 9-0-0 start and 19-4-3 record through Dec. 1, but injuries have hit them hard and they will enter their game against the Kings on Thursday at the Bell Centre on a wobbly note, having lost five of their previous six games.

Carey Price, voted the NHL’s most valuable player and best goaltender last season, is out after aggravating an apparent knee injury and isn’t expected back for another month. Right wing Brendan Gallagher has been out since he suffered two broken fingers Nov. 22 and needed surgery. “Gallagher is a big piece. He is the heart and soul of this team because this guy will play until he’s sick,” De Foy said. “After a game, his tank is empty. He gives everything.”

Constructing a long-term contender here isn’t easy. Fans won’t accept a total tear-down, and every move draws relentless media criticism — in two languages.

“I think it’s really hard to do a full rebuild,” Robitaille said. “They have three late-night TV shows — sports shows, not like we have Jimmy Fallon — that claim they’re sports shows but they’re really only about hockey and 95% about the Canadiens. So the pressure is constant. You always have to compete every year, versus when you go in a rebuild, it takes a long time.”

After missing the playoffs in the 2011-12 season, the Canadiens have lost in the first round, the conference finals and the second round. De Foy said fans now want to hear stories they sometimes know only secondhand, of past Canadiens triumphs.

“It used to be that a lot of people were writing to me to tell me, ‘You’re living in the past.’ I don’t hear it anymore,” he said. “The team is getting better, but some pieces are still missing and people know that. …They’re getting real close, and right now the window is open. If it’s not this year it could be next year or two years from now.”

That once familiar parade route would be a revelation to those of Beaulieu’s generation, a modern link to that glorious past. “Oh, I couldn’t even imagine it,” Beaulieu said of what it would be like to win the Cup. “I don’t even know the word for it. It would be just incredible.”

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