from Brendan Kelly of the Montreal Gazette,

At 3-0 Tuesday, my teenage son came running into the living room to shout — ‘Look. All the guys you hate are scoring! Desharnais, Pacioretty, Radulov. Bergevin’s a genius.’

Now clearly he’s just working through some Oedipal issues here, but he’s not the only one to express the same sentiment. When I got to the office Wednesday, Gaz photographer Dave Sidaway said more or less the same thing to me.

And you just know variations on the same conversation are happening across the city. Loads and loads of fans were dismayed with gusts up to disgusted by the team’s performance last year and were mighty jaded about a lot of players and managers by year end, notably general manager Marc Bergevin, coach Michel Therrien and prominent whipping boys like captain Max and his old pal Desharnais. When Bergevin then went and traded fan favourite Subban for Shea Weber, the grumbling went positively nuclear.

I know many of you think I make this stuff up, but the reality is that there still are thousands and thousands of disgruntled Habs fans out there. Just look at the reaction to the introduction of Therrien Tuesday night — the cheers were lukewarm at best and there were no shortage of boos. And keep in mind that the folks who’ve paid top dollar to go to the Bell Centre are the people least likely to jeer the coach or any of the players. In other words, go to any bar and you’ll find Montrealers only too pleased to vent their bad thoughts about Mike T.

So are all these malcontents back on the Habs bus after the heroics of Tuesday night and a pretty decent first week of the season? I don’t really think so. I think they’re going to wait and see.

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