About time, too!

I’m glad u mentioned the Leafs game 😉

Habs from Habitants, which was one of the archetypal roles in which French-Canadian Quebecois saw themselves.

Habitants was usually opposed to coureurs de bois. Habitants were the sit-at-home, down on the farm types; coureurs de bois were the adventurous voyagers who spent their time out trapping and only a small part of the year back home in the colonies.

But in hockey in Montreal, where in the earlier part of the century many of the city’s French-Canadians had come in from the farms, the Habs were the French-Canadians. (And, in any case, the then-dominant Church liked habitants a lot better than godless coureurs de bois, anyway.) Their opponents were not the coureurs de bois but the English Quebecois, whose team was the Montreal Maroons.

If I’m not mistaken, the Maroons’ home ice was for many years an arena on Mont-Royal Avenue corner of St. Urbain, which eventually got turned into a plaza (including a large pool hall with a great air hockey game ;-)) before it burned down a couple of years back. In any case, the Maroons ceased to exist sometime around when the NHA became the modern-day NHL, which I will wildly guess is the 1930s — though I suspect I’m off on that one.

By the way, there’s a sometimes repeated myth that says the H in the C-H logo stands for Habitants. I used to believe it; not true. It’s just Club de hockey canadien.