It’s April, 1979. Beer comes in stubbies, there’s a Trudeau in 24 Sussex Drive and the Montreal Canadiens are playing the Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL playoffs. Of this series, Ken Dryden would note the rivalry was dead (“Toronto killed it,” he wrote in The Game.); Montreal swept Toronto in four, en route to their fourth-straight NHL championship.
And now, a good 42 years later, Toronto is again playing Montreal in the playoffs for the first time. And, truth be told, I’m having a hard time working myself up for this.
A lot has changed in both cities since the 70s. Montreal, then arguably the cultural capital of Canada, has faded somewhat into a city that always seems like it’s under construction, a place that’s hard to drive through and has over-priced sandwiches at the famous smoked meat place. The Forum’s now a big lobby outside a movie theatre. I sat there in 2015, eating a toasted bagel, and sat in the box seats, looked at the pictures of Guy Lafleur and Larry Robinson on the walls, stood on the imitation of centre ice and tried to conjure up the history of the building.
The championships, the moments any hockey fan can’t forget. The comeback against the Bruins in 1979, a goal that left Gerry Cheevers laying on the ice like he’d been shot. The Good Friday brawl in 1984, when the tensions between the Nordiques, clad in Quebecois nationalist colours and iconography, and the Canadiens spilled over into a bench-clearing fight. Stanley Cup wins in 1986, 1993, plus another trip to the finals in 1989. And I’m only scratching the surface.
Toronto’s changed, too. Where even as recently as the mid-90s, it possessed a scruffy sort of charm - I can remember my visits in the mid 90s were alternately scary and exhilarating - in the past decade, it’s lurched into an uncertain future of shiny, unaffordable highrise condos, a lack of history (how many landmarks have been demolished in the name of progress since 2010?) and more than its share of controversy. From the G8 protests and mass arrests to a mayor who smoked drugs and embarrassed the city, it’s become the butt of jokes for people living outside its borders. And with a cost of living so high - exacerbated by the rise of on-demand rental units - it’s driven both people and culture out into the countryside, where they join in.
At the same time, the city’s sports culture has changed too. Championships by the Blue Jays, Toronto FC and Raptors have markedly changed the dynamic to average fans; We the North hats are all but ubiquitous, as are Blue Jay shirts. Hockey, once the main game in town, now feels like an also-ran. Despite Premier Ford wearing a Leafs mask and saying “Go Leafs go” at a presser, they’re certainly not as important in a cultural sense as they were 25, 30 years ago, when the Maple Leaf Gardens - a sweaty little bandbox out by Carlton and Church - was packed by people in jean jackets and jerseys. These days, the building is packed with cereal and sushi - it’s the flagship store for the Loblaws supermarket chain.
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This year has been a weird one for hockey, especially here in Canada. The pandemic meant that Toronto and Montreal played each other regularly, and only played other Canadian teams: Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver. I suppose in some eyes this built a sense of rivalry, but for me, something like that isn’t a thing you can force. In the 2000s, Toronto and Ottawa had a nice thing going but that was because they were both good, met in the playoffs and Ottawa had this nice sense of being overlooked, a crucial underdog element which added a nice spice to their playoff meetings.
Nothing of the sort has really happened with Toronto this year, at least to me. In a season where they played each other so often it felt like the original-six era again, nothing felt like it had any stakes: they were always to play each other again, and again after that, so nothing really mattered. There was always another game.
I recognize not everyone feels this way. For example, I have a friend named Laurie who makes sushi for a living; recently another friend ordered a roll from her. Laurie is a die-hard Montreal fan, and the person she made the roll for is a Toronto homer. So Laurie made the sushi with a little Montreal logo in the middle, and cursed it with “Montreal Vibes.” Needless to say, that night, Montreal upset the Leafs.
At the same time, I can’t help but think about what Adorno called the culture industry, and how the media shapes and informs our lives. To wit: this rivalry, one that’s being hyped up by the Rogers owned radio and TV stations, is between two teams who haven’t played a postseason game in over 40 years. Indeed, how much of a rivalry is this? One could argue Boston is a more meaningful foe for Toronto or Montreal.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. The Leafs, after over a decade of being middling to bad, are in the postseason, and they’re facing the Montreal Canadiens, a team they played ten times this year and beat seven. And the Canadiens are facing Toronto, a team who’s lost three of their last five games, and could be primed for an upset. All culture, politics and aesthetics aside, it could be a good series, and maybe it’s one that will make a lot of people care about hockey in a meaningful way again. I’m not sure. But I will admit one thing: despite myself, I’ll be watching.