Todd: At home on the road, young Canadiens revise holiday narrative

This is bonkers.

It’s that time every season when the Canadiens take to the road and their fans hide in bed with a blanket over their heads. The time when they travel to distant places and lose to big meanie teams that refuse to bow to the CH.

The time and place where seasons go to die.

The past two seasons, these very young Habs have flipped the script. They did it last year behind the fantabulous goaltending of a very young and untested Jakub Dobes. This season, it’s more of a team effort.

That – and a generous helping of bonkers. The game against Carolina on New Year’s Night is a case in point. It looked like an automatic loss. The Canadiens simply don’t beat the Hurricanes, especially not on the road.

On this evening in tobacco country, they scored twice early in the first period to take a 2-0 lead, gave that back when the ‘Canes scored three times in a little over four minutes to lead 3-2 before Carolina padded that with another to leave the Canadiens trailing 4-2.

The dreaded two-goal deficit, or what the Habs refer to as “right where we want ‘em.”

First it was Sammy Blais, with a deft goal-scorer’s goal off a feed from Lane Hutson.

Then it was Cole Caufield scoring on Alexandre Texier’s second beautiful pass of the game, after Texier set up Olympian Nick Suzuki for the opening goal of the game.

Then it was big Josh Anderson picking off a bad pass and scoring to give the Canadiens a lead they would not relinquish en route to a 7-5 win — although before it was over, Juraj Slafkovsky still had a length-of-the-ice highlight-reel special up his sleeve and Hutson would score that rarest of rarities, an empty-net beauty.

Like I said: bonkers.

Like a bad tuna sandwich, the Canadiens keep coming back. There is no insurmountable situation. No mountain they can’t climb. In three games, they have overcome deficits of 4-1, 2-0 and 4-2 to take five of a possible six points.

It won’t always work — there was that prolonged stretch this season when the goaltending (Dobes and Samuel Montembeault at the time) collapsed and the catastrophic losses piled up.

Then young Jacob Fowler came to the rescue, turning in a couple of strong starts to stabilize the goaltending as the team regained momentum.

On this trip, the club — already down five regulars — lost minutes-eating defenceman Mike Matheson to a vicious elbow from Brad Marchand in Florida. Matheson was already slumped over against the glass from a hit when Marchand came charging in from a dozen feet away to deliver an elbow to the head.

Textbook dangerous play from a repeat offender, right? Except that the department of player safety folks must have been into the spiked eggnog, because they saw nothing wrong with it.

Calls like this make you weep. If the player safety folks aren’t going to protect players from dangerous, premeditated hits to the head, why have the department at all? Shut it down and spend the money saved on concussion research.

But I digress. We were talking about bonkers.

In Tampa, the Canadiens were down 4-1, came back to tie it, dominated the overtime, but couldn’t score and lost in that gimmicky relic, the shootout.

In Florida, they played a textbook road game, holding the Panthers to a 0-0 tie through two periods. Then they gave up the kind of goal that normally guts a team, a power-play marker to professional idiot Marchand halfway through the third period. When Sam Reinhart made it 2-0 with a tick less than five minutes to play, it was the time when a lot of teams fold.

For the Habs, it was “right where we want ‘em” time.

A mere 32 seconds after Reinhart’s goal, Caufield got the Canadiens on the board. Then it was Suzuki, off an assist from the magical Ivan Demidov, to tie it. This time, they got the overtime marker on a power play, with the captain scoring.

As always when a team is going well, everyone is contributing. Sometimes it’s a little thing, like new acquisition Phillip Danault winning a defensive-zone, third-period draw against Carolina star Sebastian Aho. Sometimes it’s a painful shot block, or Blais dishing out seven hits against the Hurricanes.

It’s bonkers. It’s hard on the nerves. It’s the league’s youngest team going 12-3-5 through its first 20 road games, a feat that makes one aging columnist recall the lockout team of 1994-95 that somehow went 3-18-3 on the road with Patrick Roy in goal.

During some awful seasons when the Habs claimed things were about to turn around, the late, great Red Fisher would mutter: “Show me the players.”

Red meant the stars. The worthy heirs to the tradition of Rocket Richard, Jean Béliveau, Doug Harvey, Larry Robinson, Guy Lafleur, Jacques Plante and Ken Dryden.

It was a long time coming, Red, but here they are, the players: Nick Suzuki. Cole Caufield. Juraj Slafkovsky. Ivan Demidov. With luck, Jacob Fowler. And the extraordinary Lane Hutson.

These are the players who will move the needle, Red. The guys who will get it done.

jacktodd46@yahoo.com

jacktodd.bsky.social

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