18 years ago today, the Montreal Expos breathed their last. An 8-1 loss at the hands of the New York Mets on the ground of the defunct Shea Stadium officially marked the end of the formation founded in 1969.
Mourning supporters
I was 16 when the Expos left for Washington. I didn’t know the famous golden years of Jarry Park, nor the legendary exploits of Gary Carter. I seem to have vague memories of one time with my Uncle Michel at baseball and seeing fans throwing Oh Henry! when Henry Rodriguez was hitting a home run, but like, I’m telling you, that’s vague.
All that to say that I only knew the Expos at the beginning of the end. In other words, I naively fell in love with Our loves at the end of their life, weak, suffering and dying. Literally. For me it was magical, for others it was overwhelmingly sad. Like what, in life, everything is always relative. Some were able to grieve in advance, others not. At barely 16, you’re not sure you understand what death really is, and above all the impact it has on your own life.
If the election of the Lesage government marked the beginning of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in 1960 and the 1980 referendum marked the end, the players’ strike of 1994 marked, in my opinion, the beginning of the end, the last act of which was 10 years later, on this day in October 2004.
Maxim Trudeau
The end of life of the Expos will have been like life in general. In the end, it’s rarely beautiful. In my opinion, it is as if the club had been in palliative care for its last season. There is a saying that palliative care is the waiting room of the afterlife. Who knows?
Before this lifting of the curtain in 2004, already weakened by the vagaries of daily life and bruised by the ravages of time, it was as if the disease had struck full force a few seasons earlier. Somewhere around the turn of the 2000s. An incurable disease whose imminent death we collectively knew was patiently waiting to strike the final blow.
We saw it coming, of course. I loved guys like Vlad, Vidro, Cabrera. The warrior (Guerrero means warrior in French) was my favorite local athlete in those years. Before any player of the Canadian, the Alouettes or even Jacques Villeneuve. However, like Agatha Christie’s famous book, They were 10they all left one after the other.
Diehards were able to give them a last testimony before life ceases. During the last home series, there were a lot of tears, pain, but above all helplessness in the face of something bigger than us, whose destiny we cannot control. Supporters present, like my good friend Sébastien with whom I will be in Toronto this weekend for the Wild card games of the Jays and not the Expos…
Others, like Frank Éthier, have taken the audacity to travel to NY to witness the last withdrawal, when in the last hours of life, it really is the worst.
Death is part of life. You have to know how to honor life. On the other hand, even 18 years later, the pain can still be present. There are those wounds that never heal 100%.
