When the Nordiques left Quebec nearly 30 years ago, the hockey team’s move brought about the kind of mythologizing and nostalgia familiar to Brooklyn Dodgers fans.
The Nordiques’ period in Quebec, where they played in the NHL from 1979 to 1995, overlapped with the French-speaking region’s two failed attempts to secede from the rest of Canada, and the team’s identity became fused with that of its fans. asserting itself in a part of the world dominated by English speakers.
The Nordiques literally wore their politics on their sleeves, incorporating the fleur-de-lis of the Quebec flag into their uniforms. They also sang Canada’s national anthem only in French.
Jean-François Lisée, who led the separatist Parti Québécois from 2016 to 2018 and is now a Quebec columnist, said the team’s departure “left a hole in the politics of Quebec City and the Quebec region and a hole in francophone identity.” “He said. Le Devoir newspaper.
So ever since the financially struggling Nordiques left for Denver, a generation of Quebec’s political leaders have been trying to bring them back, even as economic changes have worsened the team’s performance, costing them C$370 million (nearly C$280 million). They even built a stadium that cost $10 million). The chances of returning are becoming increasingly slim.
“People think of themselves in national ideas and in terms of hockey teams or memories of hockey teams. Politicians have tried to exploit this sense of nationalism for political gain,” said Martin Pâquet, a Quebec historian at Laval University. Quebec. “That’s essentially why they keep calling for Nordique’s return.”
The most recent government was that of Prime Minister François Legault. He was re-elected in a landslide in 2022, but a series of missteps, including approving a 30% salary cap, saw his approval ratings fall last year. Get a raise for your legislators.
In November, as part of a strategic ploy, his government agreed to pay C$5 million to C$7 million ($3.8 million to $5.3 million) to allow the Los Angeles Kings to play two preseason games in Quebec next October. It was announced on a grand scale. The city continues to push the NHL for its own team.
Such a move would probably have led to at least a temporary boost in past opinion polls. But this time it backfired. The announcement was widely criticized for further lowering Mr. Legault’s ratings, making him the most unpopular of Canada’s 10 provincial leaders, according to a poll by the Angus Reid Institute.
Was there any criticism because of the timing of the announcement and was there anything missing from the poll? This was around the same time that hundreds of thousands of state public school teachers and health care workers went on strike demanding higher wages.
Or have you spent a lot of money on transaction costs, long-distance gambling? Mr. Legault’s finance minister, who nicknamed himself “the Nordic Minister”, was frank in admitting that, although reckless, he only had a 10% chance of getting his team back.
Perhaps it was the decline of nationalist sentiment among French Quebecers, especially young people. Or was time just passing?
“If a couple separated 25 years ago because one of the members left, it is time to move on,” Mr. Pâquet said.
Of course, the province of Quebec still has an NHL team. For decades, the Montreal Canadiens have been one of the league’s most storied franchises.
But for many people in Quebec, being a Canadiens fan was never an option. They weren’t French Canadian enough. The Canadiens played in Montreal, a multicultural, diverse and bilingual metropolis that is a historic rival to predominantly French-speaking Quebec City.
But outside the province, the Canadiens were known for their French-Canadian stars like Guy Lafleur.
With the emergence of Quebec’s independence movement in the 1960s, hopes for an NHL team in Quebec City also grew, as did hopes that it would eventually become the capital of the new nation. The city fielded a team in 1979 after the Nordiques and other teams from smaller leagues were absorbed into the NHL.
The following year, in the first referendum after Quebecers voted against independence, some channeled frustrated nationalist sentiment into fierce support for the Nordics. The game between the Nordiques and Canadiens took on mythical proportions, serving as a proxy for a larger battle.
“We learned to hate Canadians at a very young age,” said Jocelyn Simard, 65, a French Quebecois man who has lived in Quebec City his entire life and grew up a huge fan of the Chicago Blackhawks.
When the Nordiques arrived, Simard felt he had found the team he had been waiting for his whole life. The Canadian national anthem was sung in French and English before games elsewhere, but only French was heard at Nordiques Stadium. Mr. Lafleur spent the final two seasons of his long career with the Nordiques.
“Ultimately, a lot of French Canadians identified more with the Nordiques than they did with Montreal Canadians,” said Simard, adding that he had not lost hope in the Nordiques’ return.
Mr. Simard spoke while watching the Remparts, a junior league team from Quebec, play at the Vidéotron Center. It’s an expensive stadium built with public money in 2015 by provincial and city leaders to show how committed the NHL is to fielding a team. .
But if fans of Mr. Simard’s generation tended to share his feelings about the Nordiques, the importance of the team did not seem to resonate with the younger hockey fans in the stands, many of whom were born after the team left.
“I’m a fan of the Montreal Canadiens,” said Mathis Drolet, 17, a student who grew up in Quebec. “My dad, on the other hand, still has the Nordiques in his mind.”
His friend Justin Tremblay, 17, said he knew how the Nordiques were connected to the aspirations of previous generations (“Quebec wanted to be a country, that kind of thing”), 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, which now has a population of 800,000), the Nordiques struggled financially for several years before leaving for Denver in 1995. In the team’s first season in the United States, they were renamed the Colorado Avalanche and won the Stanley Cup. — deepening feelings of betrayal in Quebec.
The then-Parti Québécois-led government rejected the Nordiques’ owner’s request for a bailout. The province’s second referendum on independence from Canada was revealed just months ago.
The referendum failed by the narrowest of margins, and some politicians and political pundits ultimately blamed the loss on the government’s refusal to bail out the Nordics.
So to this day, Quebec’s political leaders vow to take back the Nordiques, and even the slightest development can generate significant interest in local news media.
“In Quebec City, those stories are on the front page of the newspaper,” said Frank Pons, a professor of sports management at Laval University.
But most hockey industry experts say a return is unlikely.
In recent years, the NHL has decided to expand into larger markets, including Seattle and Las Vegas, and has given no indication of seriously entertaining Quebec as an expansion or relocation candidate, Mr. Pons said. For the NHL, Quebec and its smaller TV market make little business sense.
“This is an economic approach, whereas in Quebec it is an emotional approach,” he said.
Given lingering feelings of resentment toward the Nordiques, few expect politicians to admit the cold, hard truth about the possibility of the Nordiques returning to their homeland.
“How many votes would you get if you did that?” 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 would say that bringing Nordique back would be a really big deal.”
