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MONTREAL - You're Mick Jagger for a moment. You're backstage. The house lights go down, the curtain goes up and the crowd goes wild. Keith Richards strums the first chord of Start Me Up or Jumpin' Jack Flash.
Boom, the spotlight hits you.
That is what it's like to be a Montreal Canadien at home for a playoff game.
"Think of the buzz you get just before your favorite band comes on," Canadiens center Jim Dowd said. "You get chills, man. Chills."
Dowd has played in Calgary, where fire spits out from the roof so far you examine your face for singe marks. He has played in Edmonton, where horns serenade the players from opening faceoff to the final buzzer. He has played in Minnesota, and nowhere in the United States do people follow hockey closer than in Minnesota.
All those places might as well be Nebraska as far as Dowd is concerned.
"They're passionate in those places," Dowd said. "But here? It's taken to a whole other level. You come out on the ice for warmups and you start to feel the buzz. In all the places I've been, I've never experienced anything like the playoffs in Montreal."
Welcome to Montreal, hockey's holy land.
Hockey in Montreal is like January football in Green Bay. It's like October baseball in the Bronx. Even those analogies seem insufficient. It's like soccer in Manchester. Or bullfighting in Spain.
No, wait, it's like ... oxygen, food and water on Earth.
"It's all that matters," said Dowd, born and raised in New Jersey. "These people breathe it, eat it, drink it. You know how in the States where everybody is a football fan? You know how even people who aren't football fans still know the local team? Well, it's kind of like that, except even more than that. Here, everybody, and I mean everybody - men, women, kids - knows the team."
And not just the current team, but the great teams of the past. Walk into a cafe on Ste. Catherines Street and you're as likely to hear someone conversing about Rocket Richard or Ken Dryden as you are to hear talk about Saku Koivu or Jose Theodore.
While people in Tampa talk about Vinny Lecavalier's goal in Game 2 with great detail, people in Montreal talk about Guy Lafleur's goal in the 1979 conference final. And they do it in greater detail.
"These people know the game," Dowd said. "They love the game and respect the game."
It's not unusual for the crowd to cheer an opponent if he makes a good play or to give the Canadiens a standing ovation after a hard-fought loss. That's how much they love the game.
In the United States, people over 50 can tell you where they were when Kennedy was shot. Here, people over 25 can tell you where they were when they heard Patrick Roy was traded. That is what hockey means to people here. It's the one thread that connects the young and the old, the liberal and the conservative, the French and the English.
Two people who might detest one another's politics or heritage sit together at Canadiens games and exchange hugs and high-fives after a Montreal goal.
Hockey is the common thread. The mutual bond. The way of life.
- On the Fly focuses on people, events and scenes around the game.