Unmoved by Carrier’s distress and afraid to upset the anglophone Mr. In the short film version, Carrier practically cowers from it. His mother pulls a bright blue Toronto Maple Leafs sweater from the box. “That day I had one of the greatest disappointments of my life,” Carrier says. Lynde grouses that local children read the catalogue more raptly than they do the scriptures.) The sweater arrives. (Later, I’d see the name “Eaton’s” again in one of the Anne of Green Gables books I devoured in elementary school. Eaton, the owner of the real-life Eaton’s department store, to order a new sweater. Her giddy son hovers over her shoulder as she thumbs through a catalogue and writes to Mr. Truly, we knew everything about him.” When a referee blows the whistle, the children at the local skating rink become “five Maurice Richards” taking the puck away from “five other Maurice Richards.” Carrier wears Richard’s sweater-“the famous number 9”-until it’s so torn and small his mother worries the neighbors will think them poor. We cut all his pictures out of the papers. “We laced our skates like Maurice Richard, we taped our sticks like Maurice Richard. More than anything, our narrator, a young Roch Carrier, loves Maurice Richard, the Canadiens star and beloved symbol of French Canada. I promise watching it will be the sweetest 10 minutes of your day. It draws from Carrier’s own boyhood in a small Quebec village, where children “lived in three places-the school, the church and the skating-rink.” (How such a culturally specific piece of literature made its way across the border to whatever classroom or library I first read it in, I don’t know.) A 1980 short film adaptation commissioned by the National Film Board and narrated by Carrier has taken on classic status of its own. That masterpiece, The Hockey Sweater, captured enough hearts in Canada to earn its first line a place on the five-dollar bill for many years. But the Montreal Canadiens play the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight-their first playoff meeting since 1979-so I’m thinking of Carrier, a literary giant of Quebec, and of the charming sports story he wrote that same year.

I am, at the moment, wearing a muscle tank. I suppose it’s the wrong time of year for Roch Carrier, who opens his most famous work by evoking winter.

Short story the hockey sweater