Montréal pro-sports season round-up

It’s no accident that Montréal is home to one of the most legendary professional sports franchises in the history of pro-sports, the Montréal Canadiens. Montréalers are passionate about being, well, Montréalers, and love for the city’s sports teams and annual competitive events – the Canadiens, Alouettes, Impact, Rogers Cup and more – is DNA-deep in the identity of the city’s inhabitants. It’s a love that’s going to see its full expression over an action-packed pro sports schedule in 2015.

The National Hockey League’s Montréal Canadiens (or “Habs,” from the French word “habitants”) are always the biggest sports story in town at this time of the year simply because we’re in the final stretch of the regular season. In decades past, now is when the Habs Nation would normally break out in a rash of collective anxiety. Not this year. Against pre-season expectations, The Habs are currently alternating for top spot in the NHL’s Eastern Conference, in large part due to the next-level net minding efforts of Carey Price, who’s spent a good part of the season writing the book on Zen and the Art of Goaltending Greatness. And despite a recent lapse in scoring, and a Western Conference road trip that doubtless unsettled a few stomachs, the largely injury-free Canadiens are looking good to go deep into the playoffs. The regular season wraps up April 11, and playoff tix will be available here. And before you can say “Stanley Cup,” the NHL regular season will begin again on Oct. 7, 2015.

There’s only one word to describe the Montréal Impact’s season so far: historic. For the very first time, Montréal’s Major League Soccer (MLS) team beat a Mexican club in the prestigious, pre-season CONCACAF Champions League tournament. This allowed the Impact to qualify for the semifinals, also a first. The energy in Montréal’s Olympic Stadium has been nothing short of electric for these matches, which have drawn upwards of 40,000 soccer fans. The next big game is the second Impact’s “home openers” against the Chicago Fire at the outdoor Stade Saputo, April 18. You will want your tickets in advance.

Football mad Montrealers love their Canadian Football League Montréal Alouettes (or Als), though this year’s beginning to shape up as something of a blind date owing to a veritable tsunami of off-season player signings. Adding to the change in faces is the departure of star receiver Duron Carter, who led the team in catches in 2014, and who has now gone on to the NFL, joining the Indianapolis Colts. One thing that is likely to stay the same is that surprise QB saviour last year, the suitably Christ-like Jonathan Crompton (who took the Al’s from a 1-7 record to a 9-9 finish last year), will be back in the passing saddle. Games begin in June and tickets are on sale now.

To say that Montréal is a city of lovers, not fighters, goes without saying. But it also loves its fighters. Georges St-Pierre, a (currently) retired three-time welterweight title holder in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) league, is considered an icon-verging-on-saint in Montréal, where he lives. His popularity has almost single-handedly fueled the popularity of UFC sanctioned events here. Which is why the upcoming April 25 UFC 186 title fights – Dillashaw vs. Barao 2, and Johnson vs. Horiguchi – at the Bell Centre will be no-miss propositions for fans of the pugilistic arts.

For many sports-minded Montrealers, the loss of the Montréal Expos, in the fall of 2004, is a decade-old open wound that stubbornly refuses to heal. This is in large part due to the fact that many of those same Montrealers equally stubbornly refuse to give up hope that “Nos Amours” (“our beloved,” as the ’Spos were/are affectionately called) will one day return. This in mind, anyone who still requires proof that America’s love of their “national pastime” is more of an open relationship need only have been at the Olympic Stadium last spring when Canada’s only other Major League Baseball team, the Toronto Blue Jays, played two exhibition games against the New York Mets which attracted nearly 50,000 fans per game. So let’s do it again. The Toronto Blue Jays face off against the Cincinnati Reds, April 3 and 4, and the atmosphere will be a guaranteed grand-slam good time.

And following a record-setting 2014 edition of the Rogers Cup in Montréal, which featured the world’s top-ranked women tennis players including hometown favourite Eugenie Bouchard, the 2015 instalment now sees the men take a kick at the Cup. France’s Jo-Wilfried Tsonga will be defending his Canadian title from last year against the biggest names in the game – Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal among them – in an attempt to remain king of the court at Uniprix Stadium, Aug. 7-16.