Think back to the word that was on everyone’s lips when this series began, when the Canadiens were massive underdogs to the powerhouse Toronto Maple Leafs, when it seemed like the Canadiens were doing everything wrong.
That word was experience.
Well, experience has two different meanings. On the one hand was the meaning everyone was talking about leading up to the series, the meaning that refers to life experience, age, savvy, know-how. The Canadiens were banking on the experience their players had in the Stanley Cup playoffs, leaving inexperienced players such as Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Cole Caufield and Alexander Romanov out of the lineup. But we’ll get back to that because experience also has another meaning, a meaning that took precedence on this very special night that actually had little to do with hockey.
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This meaning is defined by the Oxford dictionary as such: an event or occurrence that leaves an impression on someone.
Saturday night at the Bell Centre was an experience, and that definition hits it perfectly. There were 2,500 fans in the building for Game 6 of this series, a game no one expected the Canadiens to reach after falling behind in the series 3-1. As the Canadiens prepared in the dressing room to come out for the game, having already had their first encounter with actual hockey fans in more than 14 months in the warmup, they could hear those fans. They were yelling, happy for the opportunity to be there, with no curfew to respect. It was a sign of societal progress, that we are coming out the other side of this difficult time for so many.
The Canadiens have always managed to keep in mind that playing in empty buildings allowed them to bring some joy to people watching at home, people whose experiences on a daily basis were less than pleasant. But as they put the final touches on their preparations to come out and meet those fans, they could already feel them in the dressing room.
“One-hundred percent we could hear them before the game,” Canadiens captain Shea Weber said after Montreal’s 3-2 win in overtime. “Going out for warmups, I had chills again. Honestly, it was unbelievable. It felt like a lot more than 2,500 people. It was amazing. I can’t imagine what 20,000 people would feel like, because that was electric.”
Then, the Canadiens went out and started the game as though those 2,500 people were pushing them to greatness. It took only 34 seconds before the crowd began to chant Maple Leafs goaltender Jack Campbell’s name in an attempt to distract him (it didn’t work). When Weber cleared the puck on the penalty kill, the crowd roared. Phillip Danault blocked a shot, the crowd roared.
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The Canadiens got the first 10 shots on goal of the game, and that crowd had a lot to do with that.
No one can blame Weber for thinking that a crowd of 20,000 is unimaginable, because a big reason the crowd of 2,500 sounded so loud is that he and his teammates and anyone else who has been in the building during this pandemic has grown accustomed to artificially produced crowd noise that is controlled with buttons and machines.
That artificial crowd noise was loud, but it lacked something important, something everyone in the building at the Bell Centre experienced Saturday night.
It lacked emotion. It lacked humanity. The Canadiens, and those fans, got that on this night, that human interaction that has been lacking this whole season, and it made the entire experience unique and special.
Then the Canadiens went out and gave themselves a chance to experience that again.
The other meaning of the word experience, the one that had everyone up in arms prior to the series, has played a big role in the Canadiens getting to this point.
There are those who have the experience, led by Carey Price, who made 41 saves, including all 13 in overtime and looked like someone who was simply not going to allow his team to lose.
“When he’s on and settling things down, I think it helps the group as a whole, ” Weber said. “You have that backbone.”
Weber’s experience also loomed large, along with that of Petry, Ben Chiarot and Joel Edmundson, a group of four defencemen who essentially played the entire game. They might have made a few mistakes due to all that usage, but the consistent physical toll they are forcing the Maple Leafs to pay is starting to pay dividends at this late stage of the series. You can see the frequency increasing of Maple Leafs players getting rid of the puck a bit quicker than they want to, Maple Leafs forwards purposefully arriving second on the puck to avoid getting hit.
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“I’ve played against them,” Canadiens forward Tyler Toffoli said, “and didn’t like it very much.”
But there’s also the lack of experience shining. There’s Caufield and Nick Suzuki combining to score the overtime goal in Game 5, and Kotkaniemi providing the overtime winner in Game 6.
“It’s pretty unbelievable,” Kotkaniemi said. “I just tried to think, that’s probably my first-ever OT goal. So it’s pretty remarkable. It’s a great feeling, especially when the fans are in the stands. It gives you goosebumps.”
Then there is Jake Evans, a rookie who came in for Tomas Tatar and played on the Canadiens’ top line, asked to face the Maple Leafs’ best players all night and doing an excellent job not only in his own end, but in the Toronto end as well.
“The way he skates, the way he manages situations, he’s gaining maturity in his game, he plays hard,” Canadiens coach Dominique Ducharme said of Evans. “He can do a little bit of everything, and he does it well. Against those guys, you cannot just try to defend, you need to be spending O-zone time, you need to be forcing them to play defence. I thought that line had some good moments in the O-zone, forcing them to defend. Jake can help that way, not only defensively.”
When Kotkaniemi finished his postgame interview on “Hockey Night in Canada,” there were still fans in the stands. So Kotkaniemi skated back out on the ice and did a twirl, applauding the fans as they applauded him.
Kotkaniemi is 20. This was a memorable night in so many ways, but it was most memorable for him, giving his team an opportunity no one thought it would ever have.
It was an experience, in both senses of the word.
(Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
