Mail day! Huge props to Dave at Hockey Jersey Outlet for being a great guy and making sure the jersey that was shipped to me was exactly what I was looking for. I must have asked him like 20 questions, and he answered every single one of them cheerfully.

Like many collectors, one of my goals when buying jerseys is getting as close to the on-ice version as possible. Now, if I was a little taller I’d fit authentics a lot better than I do at 5’4″, so I have to make do with fan jerseys. However, Reebok Premiers are a huge letdown material-wise (and quality-wise for that matter), so I find myself looking at the older CCM jerseys quite often. So, enter the Montreal Canadiens 2003-04 Vintage Series jersey.

Although Les Canadiens began with baby blue, the team identity is formed around their red sweaters with the big blue stripe across its chest (which, oddly enough, may have been born out of necessity as an alternate sweater). While this iconic design has been through a few minor variations, it has largely stayed unchanged since it was first introduced in 1913 and still remains recognizable even to non-hockey fans.

The rendition featured here is a replica of the jerseys worn in the 1940s/50s and donned by greats such as Maurice Richard and Jean Belliveau. While very similar to the regular away jerseys worn by the Canadiens in the 90s and 2000s, differences include the all-white collar and laces.

This jersey made its first appearance at the NHL’s first-ever Heritage Classic in 2003. Hosted in Edmonton in front of 60,000 fans, temperatures reached nearly -20°C during the course of the game, forcing players like goalie Jose Theodore to wear a toque (which I actually got as well!). The NHL the capitalized on the retro-hype the next year by introducing the Vintage program which saw six teams, including the Canadiens, wear throwback jerseys in select games.

Materials

The main reason I’m such a big fan of this particular jersey is because it is made out of Ultrafil just like the ones worn on-ice. While most of the league had transitioned to air-knit by the time the new millennium rolled around, some teams like the Habs and Canucks held out and used Ultrafil for a few more years. Not that any of this really mattered to CCM’s fan jersey business though, because they started making them out of air-knit even before the teams started using it (case in point: Canucks replica vs real thing).

So you can imagine how awesome it was to wear a jersey made out of the proper materials that actually fit me. Ultrafil jerseys are built like tanks and the material’s tight knit made vibrant colours like red and blue really pop compared to air-knit or mesh. I only wish that the seams were double-stitched for durability, but that’s not even a knock on the quality of this jersey.

Player Spotlight: Jose Theodore

When Patrick Roy split with the Montreal Canadiens in 1995, he left some pretty big shoes for his successor, Jocelyn Thibault, to fill. However, while Thibault kept the team competitive with league-average save percentage and goals-against-average numbers, many fans were already looking towards a future with Jose Theodore in between the pipes.

The 44th overall pick in the 1994 first saw NHL action in the 1995-96 season, where he let in one goal on two shots during his only 9 minutes on the ice- leading to a hilarious 6.67GAA and 0.500 S% for the season. Theodore fared much better in his playoff debut in 1997 though, making 56 saves to win in triple overtime. He eventually earned a full-time roster spot in the 1999-00 season and broke the 50-game barrier in the next season after that. Post-Canadiens, Theodore manned the goal for the Colorado Avalanche, Washington Capitals, Minnesota Wild, and Florida Panthers before retiring in 2013.

While Theodore is the obvious pick since I’m a huge goalie fan and he was in net for the Heritage Classic, it goes beyond that. See, I had this book called Hockey Now! back in elementary school which featured NHL stars like Martin Brodeur, Paul Kariya, and Olli Jokinen. As a hockey-crazed kid, I read this book over and over but one player in particular always caught my eye: Jose Theodore and his gargoyle mask which I thought was just the coolest.

Next Steps

I gotta admit that I kind of cheated here; before making this post, I already had some work done to this jersey.

As you already know, I wanted to make this jersey a replica of the one worn in the Heritage Classic which had the NHL Vintage logo on its right chest. However, the jersey I ordered did not have it, so I set out to find one I could have sewn on. After trying unsuccessfully to find just the patch itself, I decided to grab some other jersey with it and just strip it off.

Luckily, I found a Vintage-series New York Rangers jersey (which was used in the previously-mentioned Vintage Program in 2003-04) for cheap on eBay. It was in pretty bad shape, but the jersey was old enough for the glue to become brittle, making stripping the patch off a breeze with the blowdryer and some patience. Once I got the patch off, I used a blue sharpie to fill in the frayed sides which had lost some of its colour. I then made my way down to Pacific Coast Cresting, who did a great job sewing down the patch as well as the crest and logos.

The next steps after this are still to be determined, although I think I will put Theodore’s name and number on it so long as his name fits on the nameplate I bought. If not, I may just go for Koivu who is a legend on his own.

In the meantime, make sure to check out the rest of my hockey jersey collection, which features jerseys like my 1912-13 Montreal Canadiens throwback jersey and my Team Canada jersey worn during the Sochi 2014 Olympics.