(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers who hated them the most. Here is Jerard Fagerberg of Boston.com, fondly recalling the 2013-14 Montreal Canadiens. Again, this was not written by us. Also: This is a roast and you will be offended by it, so don't take it so seriously.)

By Jerard Fagerberg of Boston.com

In times of loss, we must always ask ourselves – how do we explain this to the children?

Though the official declaration of death for the Montreal Canadiens is still pending an investigation from Royal Canadian Mounted Police (who are currently preoccupied pressing charges of ethnic sedition against Discover), it’s best to be proactive.

In the case of the Habs – ousted by the New York Rangers in six games in the Eastern Conference Finals – and their fanbase, we must deal with a very large, entitled, pigheaded, petulant bastard of a child. One who so richly believes in parables and phantoms and is prone to tantrums.

Obviously, this is a special case. We’re dealing with a city whose head is so far up its own ass that they don’t see the irony in lighting their arena on fire before every home game. A franchise so out of touch with reality that they tried to use their adult-diaper-wearing national anthem singer as a rallying point. A fanbase that makes less sense than Joe Haggerty at 2 a.m. on game night.

So, where conventional logic and child psychology have failed, desperate measures are necessary. To try and avoid yet another bon fire of Oldsmobiles on Saint Catherine St. and stem the tide of tears running down the border, it’s going to take tough love.

Milan Lucic-style, myth-destroying tough love.

Montreal is an enchanted city of strip clubs and gravy-slathered French fries. A city where even the thinking is magical. Every offseason, as the flames of the falafel shops dwindle, Marc Bergevin and his trusty team of revisionist historians go back to the cauldron to stir a potion that’ll pull their time-tarnished franchise out of la poubelle.

“How do we secure a Cup next year, Marc?” asks René, who was hired only because his name is René.

Bergevin replies with only a menacing grin, a Vincent Lecavalier-shaped gleam in his eye.

This is the first of the great fallacies of the Montreal Canadiens – that maintaining a quorum of native Québécois will spell success. It’s why they’ve had seven different coaches in the last ten years. That’s why they inexplicably threw $1.5 million at 38-year-old turnstyle Francis Bouillon and $4 million (!) at fourth-line paramedic Daniel Brière. Brière, who is good in the playoffs but, you know, doesn’t win trophies, came with a myth of his own that’ll surely keep the aging regular-season gopher on the Habs’ roster well past his contract expiration.

The myth of francophone purism has always been part of the Montreal narrative. It’s a well-worn fairy tale that could help has-been UFAs like Stéphane Robidas, Pierre-Marc Bouchard, or Jean-Sébastien Giguère spin straw into gold in the City of Mary this offseason. Then, when the road to El Dorado goes cold, the front office can always turtle and claim xenophobia as the culprit.

Ah, the convenience of circular logic.

But, in a city where the trophy cases could be mistaken for fixtures on Antiques Roadshow, any story will do.

When white knight Carey Price – who helped slay an ogre in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals – was felled by Chris Kreider, children across La Belle Province held their breath. They had heard the legends of Patrick Roy and Ken Dryden, and the fable-sick Montreal populace was quick to joust windmills by anointing Dustin Tokarski as the heir to their mythical throne. Sight unseen, he was thrust into the fiction.

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