Damien Cox: Underdog Canadiens a team that fans across country should be able to rally behind during Stanley Cup

It’s been a decade since Canada had a team in the Stanley Cup final.

That’s a long wait for the birthplace of the game. Watching all-American matchups in the Cup final year after year has been a bit depressing. Seeing Las Vegas get to the final in that team’s very first year of existence felt like another slap in the face.

Well, the long wait is over. Even better, this time the representative from the Great White North, the surprising Montreal Canadiens, is a team the nation should be able to get behind.

The last Canadian-based NHL club to qualify for the Cup final, you may recall, was the Vancouver Canucks in 2011. The Canucks were a terrific team, but beloved only in their backyard. They played the Boston Bruins in seven mean games for the Cup and it sure seemed like half the country, or more, was rooting for Boston.

When the Bruins walked into Vancouver for Game 7 and beat the Canucks to take the Cup, the city experienced the worst riot in its history. It left a scar on a great city.

These Montreal Canadiens are not at all like those Canucks, although police did need tear gas to force a post-game crowd to disperse after the Habs eliminated Vegas on Thursday night in Montreal. As was the case with the ’11 riot in Vancouver, that’s hardly the fault of the hockey team in question.

Otherwise, what’s not to like about these Canadiens? Carey Price is respected from coast to coast, both as a goaltender and a spokesman for Indigenous rights. Sure Brendan Gallagher drives people nuts. But his sheer effort on every shift has to be respected.

The team’s newest player, forward Cole Caufield, joined the team late in the season out of college just the way Ken Dryden did in ’71, and has scored important goals. Captain Shea Weber has long been one of the game’s most revered defencemen.

Former Leaf first round draft pick Luke Richardson, standing in for COVID-infected head coach Dominique Ducharme, got his first-ever NHL coaching win in the playoffs while wearing a lapel pin dedicated to the memory of his daughter. The team celebrates playoff wins with pizza. And how can you not be impressed with a general manager, Marc Bergevin, who is comfortable enough in his own skin to dance in celebration before a national TV audience while wearing a bright Santa-red suit?

The Habs also fired their coach during the season, were criticized for not having enough French-Canadian players (they currently have one, Phillip Danault), stumbled enough in the final weeks of the regular season that they nearly missed the playoffs and then lost three of their first four playoff games to Toronto. That they are still standing weeks after Toronto had them on the ropes is an incredible achievement. The three players who combined for the winning goal in Game 6 to eliminate the Golden Knights — Artturi Lehkonen, Danault and Gallagher — registered their first point of the series on the play. It’s been that kind of all-hands-on-deck run for the Canadiens.

Las Vegas Golden Knights goalie Robin Lehner, who let in the series-winning overtime goal to Artturi Lehkonen of the Montreal Canadiens, congratulated the Habs in a classy tweet after the game.

The team emerged from the hastily assembled, all-Canadian North Division as the champions of Canada, a singular achievement we will not likely see again. They are a 21st century version of the legendary Dawson City Nuggets, who journeyed more than 6,000 kilometres by bicycle, foot, train, ship and yes, dogsled to challenge the Ottawa Silver Seven for the Cup in 1904.

This spring, the Canadiens beat the Leafs in the first series between the two organizations in 42 years, then swept the Winnipeg Jets to emerge as Canada’s representative in this modern Cup challenge against the best of the U.S. teams.

Under those same unusual, historic circumstances, the country might have even rallied behind the 2011 Canucks.

We are a pandemic-weary country that has seen more than 26,000 deaths because of COVID, and it’s not over yet. We are also facing a growing scandal of extraordinary proportions over hundreds of bodies already found buried at the sites of former residential schools. This black mark on our country’s history will fundamentally alter how we feel about ourselves.

Hockey, of course, is to millions of Canadians very much at the centre of our national psyche. Seeing Montreal get to the Cup final won’t make the pandemic or our growing residential school-related grief go away, but it could be a cause that will give Canadians some common ground at a challenging time.

In 2019, little Jurassic Parks sprung up all over the country when Raptors made their charge to the NBA championship. This Montreal run is more rooted in tradition. But every episode of national togetherness doesn’t have to be the same.

There will be those, of course, who could never bring themselves to board a bleu, blanc et rouge bandwagon. There are sour Leaf fans still totally convinced Corey Perry intentionally tried to injure John Tavares. As always, the NHL season has gone on far too long and people turn to other distractions. Dreadful officiating all season — don’t forget the Tim Peel scandal — and in these playoffs has turned many off the NHL game entirely.

But if you’re still watching and enthusiastically embraced the novel idea of an all-Canadian division, you implicitly agreed to support the winner when they took on the Americans. That became even more the case when a phoney narrative sprung up during the season that suggested the North Division was much weaker than the three U.S. divisions. People have been counting Canadian teams out of the Cup chase for so long it became a natural reflex.

Montreal proved all that chatter to be nonsense. The Habs, in the final for the 35th time, are now four wins away from a championship that seemed almost unimaginable two months ago.

If you can’t get behind that, too bad for you.

Damien Cox is a former Star sports reporter who is a current freelance contributing columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @DamoSpin