George Gillett to Leave? Canadiens to Fold?

For some, the term Montreal Machine conjures optimistic, burgundy visions of Michael Proctor in Olympic Stadium in 1991.The Montreal Machine were the fledgling World League of American Football’s only Canadian franchise and the at times flashy, at times steady Michael Proctor was one of their quarterbacks.

He’s the only guy I remember, alright?

But for others, the term Montreal Machine might come to mean something else.

Well, I had one of those coffee-nightmares the other day (the kind where you doze off for six caffeinated but vividly dreamy minutes) and I awoke realising that the term Montreal Machine could very well be the hockey antithesis of those cheerful gridiron reminiscences.

Montreal Machine in these days of the failed centennial isn’t just a football memory.

It’s something about the city and the way it’s grinding up its simultaneously knighted and sainted team.

Montreal Machine is not football nostalgia.

Rather it is a menacing, malevolent media polyhedron.  A many-headed vicious, merciless, all-incisor, flower-headed messenger of overdue bills, unkept promises and icy doom.  It’s a throaty, demanding fan-base, with the memory of a Gorgon.  And there’s the history, the living and the remembered.  The legacies of those teams, those players that never goes away.

It’s all there.  The Montreal Machine.

The media, fans and Phorum Phantoms that roar, roil, boil and murmur meat-marrow sucking noises as they stalk, lunge and morselize the many men (and boys) of this Montreal melange that is the Montreal Canadiens.

And I’m one of them.

It’s been a bad week.  Ok, month.  Ok …. season.

Well, it feels like it.

If not the entire season, then certainly the florid fury of the past weeks of ire including and not limited to Saturday losses to New Jersey and Toronto, a standing ovation for an enemy goaltender (you call it class, I call it humiliation-mutilation), a fired coach, a failing coach and now a possible lame-duck owner.

George Gillett, we are told, has asked BMO to look over his assets and give him a report post-haste.

Well, if this is cosmic irony (where the hero, in this case all of us Montreal Romeologists – except Bertrand Raymond), then the final closing chapter will read, owner declares bankruptcy, leaves town, sells team to creepy, rich guy (I’m just sayin’) and the city dies a parched, slow Cup-less three-decade death as the franchise melts under the hot sun of Upper Canada deliverance.

Well, that’s the pessimist’s read.

And in Montreal, pessimism is the other side of a coin called ……… no, not optimism.  Au contraire, that coin’s other side is the 100th anniversary of Nos Glorieux; in sparkling gold.

The minted (Montreal) motif would be: Success without criticism is impossible.  And when we prepare for the worst we can only be hoping for the best.

And it can’t get that bad.

Can it?

Well, keep feeding the machine but try and go with a lower octane brand for now (I’ll be taking this advice, too – apologies to Chris Higgins).  We could all use the relief.

Related posts:

1. The Rest
2. Quiet Revolutions
3. Price Over Halak. Right or Wrong?
4. Carpet-Bagging Distasteful and Un-Canadian
5. Gainey Post-Season Press Conference
6. Gillett and Gainey on the Right Path