A loyal Habs fan offers some hard-won insight for Hockey Inside/Out
There’s always next time, and it’s better to move on, notes Mike Boone.
Are heretics still burned at the stake? Or, in the case of a burntout Montreal Canadiens blogger, at Moishes steak house?
Here’s the heresy: I want the Leafs to win the Stanley Cup. That’s what a season of live blogging the Canadiens on the Hockey Inside/Out page at montrealgazette.com has done to me: I’m rooting for a team Montrealers grow up hating.
Sad, isn’t it? But not as sad as the season Montreal hockey fans have endured. And speaking of endurance, how would you have enjoyed writing running commentary on a hockey team that lost 53 games this season?
Before my full-on wallow in self-pity, a history lesson:
Hockey Inside/Out began as Habs Inside/Out in November 2006. The name change came a few seasons later, at the insistence of the Canadiens, who have proprietary use of “Habs.”
Andrew Phillips, The Gazette’s editor-in-chief at the time, had been to a conference about the Internet’s impact on newspapers. Phillips attended a presentation by a Seattle writer who had created a website devoted to everything — games, practices, player and coach quotes — about the National Football League’s Seahawks. Phillips wondered whether something similar could tap into Montreal’s passion for its hockey team. The boss’s mandate was to create something that would offer fans everything they wanted to know about the Canadiens.
I pitched the live blog as a variation on something the Guardian had been publishing on English Premier League soccer games: a real-time commentary, with input from readers. So we gave it a whirl. And it clicked.
Canadiens fans were keen on a venue in which they could vent their feelings, thoughts and opinions about the team. Fan reaction would explode during the post-season.
Playoff games — remember when the Canadiens were a playoff team? — would generate in excess of 1,300 comments.
Many of the comments were knowledgeable and interesting. Some were pretty wacky.
Think of the classic cartoon in which a canine, seated at a computer keyboard, says to his fellow four-legger: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
I used to describe HI/O as “the world’s biggest tavern table.” Posting to Hockey Inside/Out under a variety of colourful pseudonyms, fans could vent their passion freely.
Fast-forward — through 12 years of spirited tavern arguments — to today. The drunks have gone home. The live blog lights have been turned off. The party’s over ... and not a minute too soon, because it wasn’t much of a party.
And try as I might to make it entertaining, the HI/O live blog often reflected the misery of the Canadiens’ season.
Live blog entries I never wrote: “What hustle by No. 67!”
■ “Karl Alzner reminds me of
■ Chris Chelios.” “The atmosphere in the Bell
■ Centre is electric tonight. Ça sent la Coupe!” “Jeff Petry reminds me of Larry
■ Robinson.” “That penalty kill was heroic.”
■ “Jonathan Drouin reminds me
■ of Jacques Lemaire.”
A live blog entry I wrote too often: “That’s a wrap, peeps. Another crap loss. Forget the playoffs.”
Canadiens fans — at least the ones who aren’t clinically delusional — began forgetting about the playoffs in the third week of October, when a 6-1 loss to the Ducks in Anaheim brought the team’s season-opening record to 1-6-1.
A year earlier, the Canadiens had started 13-1-1 — a launch that propelled them to a first-place finish in the Atlantic Division. Then came last spring ’s six-game loss to the Rangers in the opening round of the playoffs, an ignominious exit that would prove to be a harbinger of the 2017-18 season.
But as misery unfolded on the ice, the tavern table remained relatively calm. No fights erupted. No one threw beer at the hapless waiter.
The attitude of resignation among live blog readers was typified by Marc Ouellette. A Franco- Ontarian who grew up outside Windsor and teaches at a university in Virginia. Ouellette commented on the live blog all through most Canadiens games and, in an email, offers this perspective on the lost season:
“You are only as good as next time and everything you do is simultaneously a tryout and a performance review. Thus you can’t get too self-assuming, but despair isn’t an option, either. Sometimes you cut a take and move on. In my family, when something goes off-plan we say it’s only the next time. Then we move on.”
Maybe Ouellette offers a healthy perspective as Canadiens fans head into this loooooong off-season:
“Following a losing team is no problem: a) I’m also a Detroit Lions fan, and b) it’s a First World problem. HI/O, the blog and About Last Night ... helped, too.” Mike Boone’s live game blogs and About Last Night posts can be found at montrealgazette.com