When the Nordiques left Quebec nearly 30 years ago, the hockey team’s departure fueled the kind of mythologizing and nostalgia familiar among Brooklyn Dodgers fans.
The Nordiques’ time in Quebec, where they played in the NHL from 1979 to 1995, overlapped with the French-speaking province’s two failed attempts to secede from the rest of Canada, and the team’s identity merged with that of its fans: a linguistic minority struggling to assert itself in a part of the world dominated by English speakers.
The Northerners wore their politics on their sleeves, literally, placing the fleur-de-lis of the Quebec flag on their uniforms. They also sing the Canadian national anthem only in French.
The team’s exit “left a hole in the city of Quebec City and in regional politics in Quebec, and also a hole in the francophone identity,” said Jean-François Lisée, who led the separatist Parti Québécois from 2016 to 2018 , and what time is a columnist for the newspaper Le Devoir.
So, ever since the financially struggling Northerners moved to Denver, generations of Quebec political leaders have tried to bring them back, even going so far as to build an arena that cost C$370 million (nearly $280 million), even though Economic changes have made the team’s return increasingly unlikely.
“People see themselves in a national concept and a hockey team, or in the memory of a hockey team, and politicians have tried to exploit this sense of nationalism for political gain,” he said. Martin Paquet, Quebec historian at the University of Laval in Quebec. “This is essentially why they continue to call for the return of the Nordics.”
The latest to do just that was the government of Prime Minister François Legault, who was overwhelmingly re-elected for a second term in 2022 but whose approval ratings fell last year due to a series of missteps, including approving a 30% salary increase for the legislation.
In November, his government announced with great fanfare that it had agreed to pay C$5 million to C$7 million ($3.8 million and $5.3 million) for the Los Angeles Kings to play two preseason games in Quebec on next October, as part of a strategic maneuver. to continue to press the NHL for the city team.
In the past, such a move might have led to at least an improvement in the polls. But this time it failed. Harshly criticized, the ad pushed Legault’s ratings further down, helping to make him the best more unpopular of Canada’s 10 provincial leaders, according to a survey by the Angus Reid Institute.
Was the criticism, and the lack of increase in the polls, due to the timing of the announcement? It happened around the same time that hundreds of thousands of public school teachers and health workers in the province went on strike, demanding better wages.
Or was it the cost of the deal, a lot of money spent on a long-term gamble? Legault’s own finance minister, who nicknamed himself the “Minister of the Nordics”, admitted candidly, if imprudently, that the chances of having a team back were only 10%.
Perhaps it was the decline of nationalist sentiments among French Quebecers, especially young people. Or was it just the passage of time?
“If a couple has been separated because one of the members left about 25 years ago, it’s really time to move on,” Pâquet said.
Of course, the province of Quebec still has an NHL team: for decades, the Montreal Canadiens were one of the league’s most storied franchises.
But for many in Quebec, being a Canadiens fan was never an option: they were never French Canadian enough. The Canadiens played in Montreal, the multicultural, diverse and bilingual metropolis that is the historic rival of the predominantly French-speaking city of Quebec City.
Outside the province, however, the Canadiens were famous for their French-Canadian stars, such as Guy Lafleur.
As the Quebec independence movement emerged in the 1960s, so did hopes for an NHL team in Quebec City, in what it was hoped would eventually become the capital of a new nation. The city got its own team in 1979 after the Nordics and others from a minor league were absorbed into the NHL
After Quebecers voted against independence the following year, in the province’s first referendum, some channeled their frustrated nationalist feelings into fierce Northern support. The games between the Nordics and the Canadians took on mythical proportions, serving as proxies for larger battles.
“We learned as children to hate the Canadiens,” Jocelyn Simard, 65, told a French Quebecois who has lived his whole life in Quebec City and grew up a die-hard Chicago Blackhawks fan.
Once the Nordics arrived, Mr. Simard felt he had found the team he had been waiting for all his life. While the Canadian anthem was sung in both French and English before games elsewhere, only French could be heard in the Nordiques’ arena. Mr. Lafleur would play his final two seasons in a long career for the Nordics.
“In the end, many, many French Canadians identified more with the Nordics than with the Montreal Canadians,” Simard said, adding that he had not lost hope in a Nordic return.
Mr. Simard spoke as he watched a game played by Quebec’s junior league team, the Remparts, at the Vidéotron Centre, the expensive arena that provincial and city leaders built in 2015 with public funds to show the NHL how committed they were to creating a team. .
But if fans of Simard’s generation tended to share his feelings toward the Nordics, the team’s significance didn’t seem to resonate with the younger hockey fans in the arena, many of whom were born after the team’s departure.
“I’m a Montreal Canadiens fan, while my dad still has the Nordics on his mind,” Mathis Drolet, 17, told a student growing up in Quebec.
His friend, Justin Tremblay, 17, said he was aware of how Northerners were tied to the aspirations of previous generations – “Quebec wants to be a nation and all that” – but those hopes seemed distant to him.
“These are things we learned in school,” Mr. Tremblay said.
Located in the league’s smallest market — the Quebec metropolitan area now numbers about 800,000 people — the Nordiques struggled financially for years and left for Denver in 1995. In the team’s first season in the United States, renamed the Colorado Avalanche, it won the Stanley Cup. – worsening the sense of betrayal in Quebec.
The Parti Québécois-led government at the time had rejected the Nordic owner’s request for a rescue – just months, it turned out, before the province’s second referendum on independence from Canada.
The referendum failed by a razor-thin margin, with some politicians and political pundits ultimately attributing the loss to the government’s refusal to save the Nordics.
And so today, Quebec’s political leaders vow to bring the Nordics back, and even the slightest development can generate significant attention in the local media.
“In Quebec City, these stories are on the front page of the newspapers,” he said Frank Ponsprofessor of sports management at the University of Laval.
But most hockey industry experts say the chances of a return are almost nonexistent.
In recent years, the NHL has chosen to expand into larger markets, including Seattle and Las Vegas, and has given no indication that it is seriously considering Quebec as a candidate for expansion or relocation, Pons said. For the NHL, Quebec and its small TV market don’t make much business sense.
“It’s an economic approach,” he said, “whereas in Quebec it’s an emotional approach.”
Given the lingering emotions toward Northerners, few expect politicians to acknowledge the cold, hard truth about the chances of Northerners returning home.
“How many votes would they give you?” said Mr. Lisée, a former party leader. “If you don’t want to be in power, you can say so if you think so. Most politicians will say it would be a great thing to have the Nordics back.”