How 24 Stanley Cups turned the Montreal Canadiens into a religion

The final game at the Montreal Forum happened on March 11, 1996, and it ended the way these things should: with a win, 4-1 over Dallas, and then something closer to a séance than a ceremony.

The oldest living former captain, Emile Bouchard, came onto the ice carrying a lit torch. He passed it to Maurice Richard, who got a ten-minute standing ovation that stopped everything. Richard passed it to Jean Béliveau, who passed it forward through the decades—each captain handing the flame to the next in chronological order, a direct line of succession ending with Pierre Turgeon. 72 years in that building. 22 Stanley Cups. The crowd was saying goodbye to a rink, yes, but they were watching the physical embodiment of a religion pack up and move to another church.

That's kind of what the Montreal Canadiens are, really: A hockey team, sure, but la Sainte-Flanelle—the Holy Sweater. The most successful franchise in NHL history, with 24 championships and a mystique that made them inseparable from Quebec's identity itself.

But understanding why requires going back to a fight for legitimacy where it started.

1909: A team for French Canada

In November 1909, industrialist Ambrose O'Brien showed up in Montreal to buy railway supplies and walked into a fight he hadn't expected: He'd gone to the Windsor Hotel to represent the Renfrew Creamery Kings' application to join the Eastern Canada Hockey Association, only to watch the league's owners reject Renfrew, then disband the entire league to exclude the Montreal Wanderers over an arena dispute. In the hotel lobby afterward, O'Brien and Wanderers manager Jimmy Gardner hatched a plan: start a new league, the National Hockey Association, and create a team of francophone players to give the Wanderers a built-in rivalry.

On December 4, 1909, Les Canadiens were born with an explicit mission: appeal to Montreal's francophone population. O'Brien financed it temporarily, planning to hand it off to francophone ownership as soon as possible. The Montreal Gazette wasn't impressed, warning potential fans not to get too excited because "French-Canadian players of class are not numerous."

The Canadiens stocked their roster anyway—Newsy Lalonde, Didier Pitre, Georges Poulin—and played their first game on January 5, 1910, beating Cobalt 7-6 in overtime before a sellout crowd of 3,000. Within a year, George Kennedy of the Club Athlétique Canadien bought the team for $7,500.

The franchise adopted the now-famous C-wrapped-around-H logo in 1917 when they became a founding member of the National Hockey League—the "H" standing for "hockey," not habitants, despite what Madison Square Garden owner Tex Rickard mistakenly told a reporter in 1924.

But the nickname stuck anyway, borrowed from les habitants, the 17th-century settlers of New France. Some fans wore tuques and sashes to games in those early years, turning the team into walking Quebec iconography. By 1916, the Canadiens won their first Stanley Cup, beating Portland in five games.

Legitimacy, earned.

1955: Hockey became politics

Maurice "Rocket" Richard was almost more of an embodiment of Quebec than just another hocket player. The first to score 50 goals in 50 games, he'd become a provincial hero during the 1944-45 season when he shattered what was considered an impossible record. By March 1955, he was chasing another scoring title when Boston's Hal Laycoe high-sticked him during a game. Richard retaliated, slashing Laycoe repeatedly. When linesman Cliff Thompson intervened, Richard punched him.

NHL President Clarence Campbell suspended Richard for the remainder of the season and the playoffs. French Canadians accused Campbell of anti-French bias. Death threats poured in, warning Campbell not to attend the next home game on March 17. He showed up anyway.

Fans booed and pelted him with eggs and fruit. An hour into the game, someone threw a tear-gas bomb in his direction. Fire officials evacuated the building. Outside, a growing mob of angry demonstrators overwhelmed 250 police officers and rioted through downtown Montreal—70 arrests, 37 injuries, 50 stores looted, $100,000 in damage. The incident became known as the Richard Riot, and it spoke to the growing cultural gap between French Quebec and English Canada, an early flash of what would become the Quiet Revolution.

The next day, Richard went on French radio to ask fans to stop rioting and support the team in the playoffs instead. He promised he'd accept his punishment and return next year to win the Cup. The Canadiens lost in the 1955 Finals. But Richard kept his word. In 1956, under new coach Toe Blake—hired partly to help control Richard's temper—Montreal won the Stanley Cup. It was the first of five straight championships, a streak unmatched in NHL history.

The Rocket, Jacques Payette, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

1956-79: Building La Sainte-Flanelle

The 1956 victory kicked off an era of dominance so complete it stopped feeling like sports and started feeling like destiny. Five consecutive Stanley Cups from 1956 to 1960. Ten Finals appearances in a row. Jacques Plante revolutionized goaltending on November 1, 1959, when he refused to return to the ice after taking a puck to the face unless he could wear a mask—a controversial move that Blake initially hated but eventually accepted after Plante led the team on an 18-game unbeaten streak. The mask became permanent. Other goalies followed. The game changed.

Richard retired in 1960 with 544 career goals, the first player to hit 500. The Hockey Hall of Fame waived its customary three-year waiting period to induct him in 1961. But the Canadiens kept winning. Jean Béliveau, the elegant centre who'd been so loyal to the Quebec Aces that the Canadiens had to buy the entire Quebec Senior Hockey League just to sign him, became the franchise's next face. Consecutive Cups in 1965 and 1966. Another in 1968, then 1969.

And then the 1970s, when Scotty Bowman took over behind the bench and turned the Canadiens into something approaching myth. Four straight Stanley Cups from 1976 to 1979, with the 1976-77 team going 60-8-12—60 wins, only eight losses, a record for fewest defeats that still stands. Guy Lafleur led the league in scoring. Ken Dryden was so bored by the lack of competition he complained to The Hockey News about it. Larry Robinson won the Norris Trophy. That team is widely considered the greatest in NHL history.

Somewhere in there, the Canadiens stopped being a hockey team and became la Sainte-Flanelle—the Holy Sweater—a secular religion for a province that was shedding its Catholic past and replacing it with something else.

The Forum became a cathedral, and the faithful were rarely disappointed.

1993: Last dance, working-class rage

The early 1990s were brutal for Montreal. As Taylor C. Noakes wrote in the Jacobin, roughly 25 per cent of the city's population was living below the poverty line by 1991. Free trade agreements had gutted the textile and apparel sector—half a million manufacturing jobs across Canada gone almost overnight, many of them unionized positions in Montreal. The city lost 42,000 jobs in 1991, another 62,000 in 1992, including over 17,000 in clothing alone. Constitutional crises kept failing. The Oka standoff had turned into a 78-day armed confrontation between Kanienʼkehá:ka land defenders and thousands of Quebec police officers backed by the Canadian Army. Politicians at every level—federal, provincial, municipal—were failing spectacularly.

Hockey was one of the few things Quebec still dominated. But even that felt tenuous. The NHL had been expanding aggressively into American markets with no cultural ties to the game—San Jose, Tampa Bay, Anaheim—while Canadian teams faced potential relocation despite loyal fan bases. And when the Canadiens reached the 1993 Stanley Cup Finals against the Los Angeles Kings, wealthy season-ticket holders monopolized access to the games. Working-class Montrealers who'd supported the team through decades were largely shut out, left to watch from sports bars or on television.

On June 9, 1993, the Canadiens won their 24th Stanley Cup, beating the Kings 4-1 in Game 5. Patrick Roy won his second Conn Smythe Trophy. The team had set an NHL record with 10 consecutive overtime victories during the playoffs. It should have been pure celebration.

Instead, what followed was one of the worst riots in Montreal history. More than 100,000 people flooded downtown. Cars were overturned and set on fire. Over 100 stores were looted. The damage exceeded $2.5 million. Police largely stood by and watched, reluctant to intervene after being criticized for brutality just weeks earlier during a massive labour demonstration. Mayor Jean Doré blamed "organized gangs." Police Chief Alain St. Germain called it "a breakdown of the social order."

An anonymous looter, interviewed by an Associated Press reporter on the street that night, put it more simply: "The Habs won the cup and big bonuses. This is what we get."

It was the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup since.

1995: The night the empire died

On December 2, 1995, the Detroit Red Wings embarrassed the Montreal Canadiens 11-1 at the Forum. Patrick Roy, the franchise goaltender who'd won two Cups and two Conn Smythe Trophies, allowed nine goals on 26 shots before being pulled in the second period to mock cheers from the Montreal crowd. Roy was furious—not at the fans, but at head coach Mario Tremblay, who he felt had deliberately left him in to be humiliated. When Roy reached the bench, he walked past Tremblay to Canadiens President Ronald Corey, seated in the first row, and said: "This is my last game in Montreal."

Four days later, Roy was traded to the Colorado Avalanche. Colorado won the Stanley Cup that same season. Roy won another in 2001 and a third Conn Smythe Trophy before retiring in 2003 as the winningest goaltender in NHL history.

The Canadiens, meanwhile, fell into an extended stretch of mediocrity they've never really escaped. They missed the playoffs in four of the next ten seasons. They failed to advance past the second round until 2010. The dynasty was over. What followed was something harder to define—a team with all the history, all the mythology, but none of the dominance that had created it in the first place.

2016-21: What remains when glory fades

Something unexpected happened when the 2020-21 Canadiens made an improbable run to the Stanley Cup Finals. They'd finished fourth in the North Division during a pandemic-shortened season, barely scraping into the playoffs. Then they upset Toronto in seven games, swept Winnipeg, and beat Vegas to reach the Finals for the first time since 1993. They became "Canada's Team" for a few weeks—the first Canadian team to reach the Finals since Vancouver in 2011.

They lost to Tampa Bay in five games.

The following season, 2021-22, the Canadiens finished last in the entire league for the first time since 1939-40. They set franchise records for most regulation losses (49), most goals against (319), fewest wins (22), and fewest points (55).

General Manager Marc Bergevin was fired mid-season.

What's left?

There are 24 championship banners hanging in the Bell Centre rafters. Fifteen retired numbers honouring 18 players. A Builder's Row for the architects of all that success. The Canadiens are still the most successful franchise in NHL history, and the Bell Centre still packs in over 21,000 fans a night.

But none of those banners are newer than 1993. The Habs haven't won a playoff series since 2021, and that Finals run feels more like an anomaly than a resurgence. The league has changed. The economics have changed. Quebec itself has changed. The team that was explicitly founded to represent francophone Montreal in 1909 now operates in a globalized NHL where nationality matters less than salary caps and TV markets.

But la Sainte-Flanelle endures and the faithful still show up. The history still matters. When you've built a religion around winning, the absence of victory doesn't erase belief, but it is nonetheless more complicated. The Canadiens endure as a physical embodiment of an identity that was forged in legitimacy battles, refined through dynasty, and tested by decline.

The torch still burns 32 years later, and Montreal's waiting for the next shot at letting it burn brighter.