Quebec celebrates first official hockey game on March 3, 1875

Hockey celebrated its 150th anniversary on Monday, with the first official game taking place at Montreal’s Victoria indoor rink on March 3, 1875.

Ministers of Culture and Sport, Mathieu Lacombe and Isabelle Charest, marked the anniversary by designating the game as a historic event on the Quebec Cultural Heritage Register.

The very first official game pitted two teams of nine players against each other at the Victoria rink, and the puck was, at the time, a wooden disc to avoid injuring spectators and breaking arena windows.

One of the teams was led by James George Aylwin Creighton, who won 2-1. Considered the father of modern hockey, James G. A. Creighton produced the first official written rules for the game of ice hockey in 1877.

He was honoured at the Bell Centre in 2008 by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

For Lacombe, hockey occupies a significant place in the collective imagination of Quebecers: “Hockey is an inescapable symbol of Quebec’s culture and identity. For our government, for us, giving ourselves the means to celebrate it together, to give it its rightful place in our cultural heritage, is one more lever to stimulate the pride of Quebecers in their history, their culture, their values and their traditions.”

Charest maintained that all Quebec citizens have a more or less close, but always very real, link with the sport.

“We all have memories of hockey, whether we played, didn’t play, watched it as a family, took part in big events, parades, whatever; hockey has been part of us, part of who we are for 150 years now, and we can see just how important a reference it still is, just how much we talk about field hockey,” she said.

Present at the announcement, former Canadiens Yvon Lambert, now 74 and holder of four Stanley Cup rings, was delighted by the decision: “It’s great for Montreal, it’s great for Quebec. We, Quebecers, are proud of that first hockey game here, in 1875. We should be proud of that. We shouldn’t be embarrassed to talk about it.”

A mock-up of a commemorative plaque was also unveiled at the event, which took place at the Centre Sheraton Hotel, the former site of the Victoria Rink, just a stone’s throw away from the Bell Centre.

The designation of this first game is in addition to the sanctioning of the Act recognizing ice hockey as Quebec’s national sport.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on March 3, 2024.