Wearing The Oldest Hockey Jersey With Great Pride
In the beginning there were four teams in the National Hockey League. Eventually that number grew to six and today there are over thirty teams competing for Lord Stanley’s Cup. The Montreal Canadians have been with the league since the very beginning. They were there lacing up their skates when the first game opened back in the 1910′s and they are still here today. Their roster has changed with the generations of great hockey players but oddly enough their sweater has not changed much at all.
The Montreal Canadians hockey jersey is one of the oldest hockey styles in the game, if not the oldest. The red,casual clothing, white, and blue color scheme has remained steady throughout the decades and the players who have worn it have worn it with great pride. The Montreal Canadians are perhaps the most beloved team in Canada. If you speak French and live in Canada there is a good chance that you are a Montreal Canadians fan and own some form of Montreal Canadiens jersey.
When the team first began in 1917 the jersey design was mostly a red palette with thick blue stripes for arm bands and one stretching across the chest. In the center of the player’s chest sat the team logo: a capital letter C for Canadian and between the top and bottom of the see rests comfortably the letter H for Habs (a popular term for Quebecois). The jersey layout hasn’t changed much since then. The C and H remain staples of Montreal fashion to this very day and the only other starkly different jersey has a maple leaf in the center and red and white stripes all over.
Roch Carrier even wrote a children’s story about the famous Montreal Canadians jersey called the Hockey Sweater. Published in 1979 the book tells the story of a young boy who needs to buy a new hockey sweater to go out on the pond and skate with his friends. His old Montreal Canadians sweater was tattered and his mother didn’t want him to wear it anymore so she ordered a new one from Eaton’s. The boy was thrilled until that fateful day when the wrong sweater came in the mail and changed Canada’s history forever.
The Canadians’ jersey has become one of those iconic symbols. It represents not only the team but a legacy of fantastic hockey players and rich sports history. It is impossible to talk about the National Hockey League without thinking immediately about the big red C and some of the greatest hockey players the world has ever seen have worn it with pride.