They are back | The Press

I’m looking for the explanation for Lane Hutson’s goal on Friday in overtime.

Yes, yes, I know: Texier who protects the puck well, who escapes his roofer, who gives it to Lane Hutson… Who throws and counts.

Sirens, ovation, delirium, Olé-Olé-Olé-Olé…

I know all that.

But have you seen the goal? Have you watched it again, rewatched it from all angles? Did you press “pause” ten times during the shot, trying to understand?

I did this^⁠1.

And I still don’t understand how that puck found its way between Hutson’s Bauer Proto2 stick and the right corner of the Lightning goal. It defies logic.

This is because between Lane Hutson and goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy, there are exactly six players in the shooting line: four from the Lightning and two from the Canadian.

Statistically, the puck could have – should have – hit any of these moving player-shaped obstacles. They created a screen, a giant screen between Hutson and Vasilevskiy’s goal…

I give the measurements, if I may, of the six players between the CH defender and the Éclairs goalkeeper:

Nick Paul: 6 feet 4 inches, 234 pounds

Emil Lilleberg: 6 feet 3 inches, 215 pounds

Declan Carlile: 6 feet 3 inches, 190 pounds

Jake Guentzel, the most modest of obstacles: 5 feet 11 inches, 176 pounds

Zachary Bolduc: 6 feet, 187 pounds

Kirby Dach: 6 feet 3 inches, 221 pounds

This puck should have been stopped, deflected by a stick, a shin, an elbow, a glove, an arm, a thigh, a jaw.

Except no.

The round, black object measuring 7.62 centimeters in diameter, 2.54 centimeters thick and weighing 160 grams instead found a way not to ricochet off the surface of one of the six players making a screen.

For what ?

We should study this Montreal mystery of April 24, 2026 like the mystery of the Place Bonaventure UFO (November 7, 1990).

Watch the video of Hutson’s goal again. Forget the beauty of the gesture, the poetry of Texier’s ballet before his pass to Hutson, forget the perfection of the defender’s momentum. Watch the video: it defies the laws of probability, this puck should never have reached the goal, it’s an anomaly.

Since my goal, especially on the weekend, is to try to uncover the meaning (wherever it is hidden), I am going to try the beginning of an answer, after almost 24 hours of thinking almost non-stop about the trajectory of this puck…

I hesitated for a long time between two hypotheses, which relate more to faith than to science.

First hypothesis: this puck penetrated a gap in the space-time continuum to find its way to the net, calling into question a hundred years of certainty since Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

We can theorize that this puck was in fact launched a million years ago in another version of our reality, that it passed through places and times, in slow motion, from the Russian Revolution, through the death of Cro-Magnon and the birth of the trees that made it possible to build the Great Ermineshe spied on Newton when he was devising his three laws of motion and came close to the bullet that killed Kennedy, mastering all kinds of variables, so to speak – learning from them, as it were – and finally managing to find her way between Lane Hutson’s stick and the Lightning net, Friday night, in our own space-time…

I know it’s hard to believe. But tell yourself this: It’s as hard to believe as Hutson’s goal.

Second hypothesis: THEY are back!

“They”, you know who I’m talking about…

I’m talking about these entities who invalidated Nordique Alain Côté’s goal in 1987, providentially brought Ken Dryden into view in 1971, multiplied Patrick Roy’s saves in 1986 and 1993 and – among others – forced Bruins coach Don Cherry to send too many players on the ice in 1979….

If you only knew the Canadian at the Bell Centre, there’s a good chance you have no idea who – or what, depending – I’m talking about: the ghosts of the Forum.

But if you are my age, and even older – in short, if you are old – you know that ghosts have haunted the Montreal Forum for decades, silently helping the Flying Frenchmen to line up triumphs…

Then, in 1996, when the Canadian deserted the Forum for the Molson Center (now Bell), we thought that these ghosts had gotten lost, between Atwater and De La Gauchetière.

I lean towards this option: the ghosts took 30 years to cross the 2.2 kilometers separating the old Forum from the Bell Centre.

And there, in 2026, there they are.

This is the only explanation for Lane Hutson’s goal on Friday: we are in mysticism, not physics.

Go Habs Go.