By Marc-André Breault – Each generation has its beautiful and less appealing moments. There have been wars, floods, ice storms, hijacked planes… There have also been amazing moments. The glorious history of the Montreal Canadiens has brought 24 beautiful moments so far. Sequences more fruitful than others. There was the era of Richard, Béliveau and other great players who passed through Montreal. There was the era of the “Big Three” with Savard, Lapointe and Robinson. Since then, we have been entitled to the era of Roy, who gave us two Stanley Cups, and this is the last beautiful era if we exclude the strong emotions experienced this past summer.

I was listening to 96.9 CKOI on my way to work, because, yes, I have a job to put bread on the table, and Martin Cloutier was talking about Tom Brady’s retirement. He said that people born in the 80s and 90s are lucky because they have seen several great players pass through time. In baseball, we could see Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, Samy Sosa, Éric Gagné, Mariano Rivera… In football, we saw Payton Manning, Drew Brees, Brett Favre and, of course, Tom Brady. In basketball, there were Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant… In golf, we can think of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson… In tennis, the unbeatable trio of Nadal, Djokovic and Federer, who hold practically all the records. There is also Venus Williams, who has been dominant among women. In Quebec, we have seen Eugénie Bouchard and now Bianca Andrescu. Jacques Villeneuve, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton in F1. Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane and many others in soccer.

Obviously, what interests us is hockey. If we go back to the last years of the 1970s, we were treated to real domination by our Montreal team. Serge Savard, Larry Robinson and Guy Lapointe formed the Big Three. The team set a record that will be hard to beat, ending the 1976-77 season with just 8 losses. We were treated to the careers of Gretzky, Lemieux, Jagr, Lindros, Crosby, Ovechkin, Lidstrom, Brodeur, Roy, Luongo and Messier… Now we have McDavid, Matthews, Vasilevskiy, Price, Makar… The end of Guy Lafleur’s career . All of the important players and several have broken records, while the younger ones will be called upon to break more over the next few years.

As Martin said so well in his radio intervention, we are lucky to have experienced all of this and we will certainly experience many more.

Congratulations to Tom Brady for this exceptional career. Enjoy your retirement with Gisele!

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