In a few days, when the Canadian men’s hockey Olympic team laces up their skates for their first game at the Milan–Cortina Games, there’ll be someone missing: Quebec players.

The province has traditionally supplied an average of four Quebec-born players per squad since the National Hockey League began allowing teams to send players to Olympic rosters. In 2010, at the Vancouver Olympics, when Canada won gold, all three goalies were Quebecers: Martin Brodeur, Marc-André Fleury, and Roberto Luongo.

In a historic first, since 1952, Canada’s twenty-five-man hockey delegation won’t have anyone from la belle province, where the game was born, where kids are raised to bask in the memory of Les Glorieux, and where the Montréal Canadiens’ legacy of twenty-four Stanley Cups (the most in the NHL) acts as a unifying force, transcending language and politics.

While the news reverberated across the country, in Quebec it was treated as a national tragedy, prompting hard questions about the province’s ability to produce elite talent. On social media, Montreal journalist Brendan Kelly called the Team Canada roster announcement an “indictment of Hockey Québec,” referring to the provincial body in charge of moulding future national players.

The author of Habs Nation: A People’s History of the Montreal Canadiens,........

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