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Twenty years later, Serge Savard still remains a bit bitter about the way he was fired as general manager of the Canadiens.

On Oct. 17, 1995, Canadiens president Ronald Corey panicked after the team got off to an 0-4 start and fired Savard, along with head coach Jacques Demers. In their place, Corey put former Canadiens players Réjean Houle and Mario Tremblay, who had absolutely no experience in those roles.

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The rest, as they say, is history — and it became very ugly.

“Nobody likes to be fired,” Savard recalled on Friday. “What I could not overcome was a week or two weeks before I was fired, I told Ronald Corey that I thought I had a Stanley Cup team in my hands — and he agreed with me at that time. Being fired after four games, I had a tough time to accept that part of it.”

The firing came less than two years after the Canadiens had won the Stanley Cup and after the team had missed the playoffs during the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season with a 18-23-7 record.