James Moore

And so I paid for my ticket.

I said, yeah, I'm going to go.

So we paid for my ticket.

uh, paid for my airfare.

We went down to the challenger, but we had, you know, this, this is, this is a personal thing, not a, you know, so anyway, so I had to read it.

We're checked for the receiver general for a couple of thousand or whatever, but we went down, went to, um, uh, to Boston garden or fleet center, whatever it's called now.

And, and we went in, met Cam Neely before the game.

He was my boyhood idol as, as a Vancouver boy, former Canuck as well, GM of the, of,

The Canucks turned out they lost game three, so we weren't going to win in game four.

We decided to go anyway.

That was the most incredible hockey environment next to the game, the gold winning game of the Olympics for Team Canada in Boston.

That crowd, steep rake of the stadiums was really steep, really aggressive, really loud, but still a quarter of the people in the arena were Vancouver Canucks fans.

who had made the trip, who had come out.

And so it's really a galvanizing thing.

And you see now in Montreal, the energy in the streets and the pride in the team, the narrative that we've talked about.

You know, as churches, our attendance is down, volunteerism is down.

The singing of the national anthem happens at hockey games and in sports arenas in ways that doesn't happen.

It's kind of the new town hall.

It's the new village square in a lot of ways for a lot of people where people of different backgrounds come together.

A lot of working class people come together and they enjoy hockey and they stand in a room and they all cheer for something that they have in common.